#74b: Dennis Althar (Althar Audio) (Full/Long Edit)

Hello, everyone. A brief note on today's episode. Our guest in this conversation,
Dennis Alther, and I had a particularly long conversation. The longest to date,
actually, and this is the full version of that conversation. If you would prefer a
condensed accounting of Dennis's truly incredible story and musings, you can refer to
the edited version of this episode instead. But with that, please enjoy my
conversation with Dennis Alther.
Anything that affects our senses, because we seek out things, they always talk about
this business thing. If I hear one more time, they say, "What's the pain point?" Do
they miss all the pleasure point? You don't get comfortable seats because of pain.
You get comfortable. You'll seek comfort. You'll seek good things. You'll run away
from pain. So So do you want only sell because of the pain point or do you want
to have things where it's a pleasure point people feel good about what you what you
got people love music. Why would they sell all those CDs are streaming or all this
because we're wired for sound. Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem
we're telling stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them.
Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast where we are exploring what people are
building in Cleveland. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today I had the real
pleasure of speaking with Dennis Alther. This conversation is our longest to date and
only more wisdom is unlocked the deeper into the throes of Dennis's mind we go.
Today Dennis founded and runs author audio here in Slavic Village within Cleveland
where he sells premier audio systems. But as you'll hear, Dennis not only has a
deep passion for unlocking the highest levels of audible literacy, but there is a
real commitment to the craft itself and questioning across the board why we've always
done things the way we've done things and really digging into and solutioning where
the justification for the way things are today, is that this has always been the
way that we have done it. This curiosity Dennis carries with him has exposed him to
a breadth of experiences from a prodigal expertise in electronics to the United
States Air Force to medical technology to audio systems. And in this conversation,
we really cover everything from Dennis's early life to hard electronics to
entrepreneurship to philosophy itself. This really was a special conversation and I
hope you all enjoy it.
Welcome Dennis. It is a real pleasure to have you on. Once again, I'll bring up
Bob Sopko who back through the archives here was actually one of the first guests
we've had on the podcast and is kind of an ultimate maven here in Cleveland, making
connections for the show and bringing folks together. And I'll actually let Bob set
the stage here a little bit 'cause the way he introduced me to you was really kind
of extraordinary. But he introduced you as his friend, as someone who's used your
own inventiveness to help bring yourself to a productive life as someone who read
every book on electronics in the library by the time you were seven as a community
builder, as a veteran, as an entrepreneur, as a colleague of Steve Wozniak since the
'70s. And now you're building and manufacturing here in Cleveland, incredible sound
systems. And so there's just a lot to unpack and uncover here. And So I'd love to
dive into this, leaving the floor kind of open to you to take us through your
journey and your past as we work our way towards some of the more specific things.
But I'd love to just hear a little bit about yourself. Well, I would first off say
that I'm not a colleague of Steve Wozniak's, but I've known him. So he'll return my
emails generally, so it's not like we work together, But that's another story.
So where should we start on this journey here? Yeah, I think I'd love to start
maybe even as far back as your interest in electronics as kind of the common theme
that ties, as I have seen in a lot of your work together, maybe stems from that.
Yeah. It's all about technology. I would consider myself an Uber geek.
I live for electronics and mechanics and anything that's creative and you could make
the world a better place. So as you said, I started reading books on electronics
when I was a kid, mainly because I was in the projects and after I was out of
the projects, I had, you know, like three half brothers and, you know, stepfathers
that weren't the best people. One of them always had that where you were to be
seen but never heard. So I made as much time as I could away from the house and
I spent a lot of time in the library reading about a lot of sci -fi, love sci -fi,
read everything on electronics. I remember reading about how TV's work can go, this
is simple, this is so logical. And then I read all the stuff on the children's
side and then I snuck over to the adult side and and all that stuff and really
started repairing, you know, stereos and TVs and stuff at an early,
early age. I'd repair anything for a buck in parts. So, and I got really good at
troubleshooting, quite, quite good and understanding how, but I couldn't just repair
anything. I always had to modify it. It was like, if you had a five tube radio
and it would take time to warm up and come on, I would put what's called a diode
across the power switch that would be the opposite of the power supply, that it
would keep the tubes warm but it wouldn't give them power. And then when you threw
the switch it would short by the diode and instant on television, instant on radios
and no one had that back then. So I was always tinkering, always adding more parts
or taking parts out and got quite good at it. So early part of my life I bought
all my own test equipment and had my first job and I was probably around nine or
10 working in a hardware store, learning how to put together bikes and all that
kind of good stuff. And then as I went through life, due to my one, I was really
great at electronics. I really knew that I was in summer, I went to Balmance
College and part of a program called Upward Bound. And I kind of snuck away from
home after, you know, in ninth grade, I started staying with friends and couch
surfing and, you know, the home situations thunk so bad. But I did graduate from
high school. I was on my own pretty much. I was actually emancipated,
they call it, legally. And I always had multiple jobs, had work. I could go without
sleeping, maybe sleeping three, four hours a night. So I was really productive,
always building stuff, always, and I had a passion for sound and passion for
pictures and electronics and cars, you know, I owned a ton of cars.
When I was eight years old, I was already buying and selling cars. So, you know,
you could own a car at any age, you couldn't drive it. So at one time I had five
cars across from where we lived in a here in Slavic village. I don't know who
owned the property. It was an empty lot and I had five cars over there and I'd
swap cars and, you know, it was crazy. It was crazy. So no hot wheels,
real cars. No, no, real cars, you know, but all of them are real junk. I mean,
you're talking about these things had may, may pop tires, they may pop at any
moment, you know, they were, they were pretty, pretty sore cars, they were ready,
they were passed ready for being for the scrapyard. But they ran, they ran. My one
brother passed away by sleeping in his car and the fumes got to him and at that
point I was around 17 and I go, "You know, I really am good at electronics. I'm
really good at electronics. But who's going to believe you?" You know, like, "Well,
you taught yourself. Well, what school did you go to, this, that, and the other?"
And actually I had had an opportunity to go to Exeter and my mother at that time
was a little narcissistic. You know, people are what they are and it meant she
would go off well for her sooner, so that wasn't going to happen. Before then, I
had a chance to skip three grades when I was in elementary school, same story. So
when that happened, I figured, you know, this is time to get out of here. That's
when I kind of went on my own and to back up a little bit. And then when my
brother passed away, I figured, well, maybe if I joined the Air Force and I told
people why, you know, I had, where do you know electronics? So I was in the Air
Force. Then that would validate that I actually knew electronics 'cause most people
say, well, if you're in the military, did electronics, that's even better than going
to college for a trade school. So I joined the Air Force. I went to their
electronics school in Keisler after basic, of course. And I had a two and a half
year course. I think I did it in about eight weeks. I had the highest scores they
ever had, You know just took a test every day. That's all they'd let you do is
one test today Or I would have been out of there a lot sooner. So in about eight
weeks I took all the tests ended up going to the Southeast Asia to the Philippines
and working on things like commando escort and presidential communications and sensor
program and things called TOF and all this microwave stuff and everything basically
in this, you know Philippines Thailand, so I had a great career.
I was working did work with a three -star general and didn't have any rank I
remember used to say it looks for me one day and he goes Well, what did you do
to get busted? I never got any stripes, you know Cuz I tell me be over in the
Philippines on any career Usually had a stripe or two mine have any I said I would
love to have you you can give me one if you'd like I made airmen in the You
know, you're an airman in the base and all that kind of stuff. So I was pretty
involved in things and that was right in around 72. And then at the end of that,
I got transferred to the states to go to Panama City, Florida. And that's right
when Vietnam ended and they said, well, if you want to get rid of 40 ,000 people
on your job, what you're doing right now no longer exists because it's in direct
support of what some of the stuff we're doing and would Would you like an early
out with full benefits? I go, well, let me look that up and think about that so
I'll have medical and college and GI bill for buying a house and My purpose is to
go in and have people believe that I know something about electronics Yeah, I think
I'll take that deal. So the next day I was out of the Air Force. It was
unbelievable So when I got out of the Air Force, I, you know, immediately started
looking for a job. I went on. I never got on unemployment. I came back to
Cleveland of all things. I'm leaving Panama City, Florida, coming back to Cleveland.
So, you know, I'm sure there's something totally wrong with my brain there because
of the nice warm climate. And then you come back to, well, you don't like the
weather here. Wait a minute. You know, I had a friend was a weatherman here. He
left because the weather didn't agree with him. It was just So so I come back here
and then I go to work for a small company for about two weeks and quit them
because They were they were ripping people off and all that and I had two more of
a high ground I I they would they would go all the people go to work and then
they would meet at a bar a Block away and drink for about three or four hours go
out and work about an hour And then they come back and actually the president of
the company was with all the guys gathered up and one of the guys stole a ladder
from like Ohio Bell and they brought it back and and the president of company
actually sprayed painted over that and put their name on the ladder and I go I
don't need to have anything to do with this company. So I went to work for a
company that repaired medical equipment and computer peripherals big things like what
they call XY plotters large -scale plotters and had those kind of clients they did a
lot of what's called ultrasound back then and that was like in 77 so I worked with
them for about a year and then I kept having people from like we did work for
Bobby Brooks and a few other customers and they were constantly calling me by the
way I was the best service repair man in the country so when somebody couldn't fix
something I'd be going in places and I was working 80 hour weeks I was I wasn't I
was a beast so I started my own company because people were, the guys, especially
Bobby Brooks, they were saying, you got to come to work because their service on
their equipment, it was a company called Gerber made their big plotters that drew
their dress patterns. And their closest service was out of Connecticut, I believe.
And I could go in and service something an hour, they'd have to fly somebody in,
get parts. I would have the time, I could repair right down that a transistor on
the boards, everything I've ever serviced, I could actually go down that apart and
these are some really sophisticated machines. So then we did a company that I
started did a lot of service on at the beginning times on ultrasound equipment,
which is just new for looking at babies, looking at hearts, a lot of heart stress
testing stuff. In fact, I would train the doctors how to run treadmill tests and
how to read the EKGs. They know how to read KGs, but how to run the treadmill
test and how to, you know, put the patient and on that and I was selling the
machines too so I was doing all from apples to nuts from one end to the other but
I was buying used machines and refurbishing them and reselling them and also I was
doing uh your name gets around I end up doing works for Bobby Brooks the next
thing you know I'm doing service for Richmond brothers and on they've got big laser
cutters cutting out suits and doing work for General and then BF Goodrich and
General Tire and all the tire companies, they'd have research equipment and they'd
have stuff that was abandoned. Child, nobody took care of it anymore. So I was
either working on super state -of -the -art stuff or stuff that was extremely old and
no one know how to service it. So that was my two points. Anything that everybody's
service center doing, I didn't have any interest in that, but stuff that's really,
really old, no one knows how to repair, and stuff that's state -of -the -art, no one
knows how to repair, and both of those ends are very rewarding because you're
actually doing something nobody else can do, and that was my way of getting self
-worth, I guess. Everybody has a reason why God put them here, and mine has to do
electronics. And in doing the medical stuff, I ended up, when the companies couldn't
repair something, they would fly me to Texas or Florida or wherever where the
company had worked on something for two or three weeks. I'd fly in, put my scopes
and equipment on the thing, and that was when you could carry a lot more stuff on
the planes than you could now. And I'd get it running within an hour down the
transistor and leave. And then you could always up your prices.
And So I love doing that stuff. But in doing that, in doing the radiology stuff,
I ended up doing more and more scene needs where people in ultrasound specifically,
the video recorders, in order to watch, they would videotape things 'cause it was
real time at that time. And the original pictures were static like a CAT scan or
an MR. But the ultrasound images are moving images. So on their film they would do
just like nine pictures. But they're static images. The real diagnostic qualities in
real time video. But the video recorders back in the 70s were pretty crummy. They
started out with three quarter inch tape. They went to half inch tape. The quality
was very inferior to the real picture on the screen. And I go, well, you know,
I'd look at the things and I ended up modifying VCRs for like super high resolution
using standard tape and super high speed so we could get anywhere on the tape in
like 17 seconds on a two hour tape and then we modified them to where they could
do really high resolution like HDTV which half inch tape was impossible to do but
nobody told me I didn't know you couldn't do it and it's a lot like when Steve
Wozniak what made Apple really happen is and he put a floppy drive on it. And he'd
never seen a floppy drive. He'd never worked on it. At that time, they had eight
inch drives and the five inch just came out and he read the specs and he goes,
well, it needs this, this and the other. So with 14 chips, he made an interface to
talk to it. Then later on, he looked at an eight inch drive and that thing's got
like 60 chips on the back of it. And he goes, if he had looked at that first, he
would have went down a totally different path, but in his ignorance, he gave it
what it needed and kept thinking, I gotta be doing something wrong because why would
they use 60 chips when you could do this with 14? Because they don't understand.
Most things I find in life, I put my name upside down in my emails. Most things
in life, people do things exactly backward and upside down from what they should be.
And we'll get into that in a little bit down the Yeah, it was it was something I
wanted to ask you about. Yeah, we're not really going to that. That's a that's a
whole story. So anyway, we started repairing this medical equipment and then we
started building high resolution VCRs and we ended up in changing the company from
Ultronix technical systems to Ultronix medical systems. And we started doing we were
doing tele radiography. We sent MRCT nuclear and ultrasound images to the at night
time for the northern part of Ohio for 95 % market share. So the founding insight
was really one of deep technical expertise and seeing that something is now possible
that people weren't thinking about. And not hard to do. We started building analysis
systems and other companies, I could tell you a couple of these secrets because it's
past A now, but they were taking, In order to do measurements on a cardiac image
on ultrasound, they would play a videotape into a storage thing. They could play the
tape. They could freeze an image. And the slow -mo, the tape, to make it go
backward and forward was so -so. And I had perfected to be able to slow -mo back
and forth as good as a laser disc would be, really sharp image,
without disturbances in the picture. Well, they would take and play an image into a
computer and they could only grab one image. So as it was playing, they'd snapshot
an image. And then they would draw on top of this interface to grab one picture
would normally cost about $20 ,000. So the only way they could overlay graphics
'cause the computers run at a different rate than your video does, if that makes
sense. They're different resolutions. And I it out of way real simply by taking
since I was building VCRs, I made the VCR slave to the computer rather than a
computer try to slave to the VCR. So I had that at the top of the picture, it's
what's called vertical. You start at the top, you run 500 lines down or 250 lines
down, then you go back to the top, you run down the screen, 250 more lines, it's
called interlaced. What I did was the drum on the video recorder in playback, it
locks to the internal sync on the VCR. I made it lock to the computer so that
when it started its run at the top with the drum at the very beginning of the
tape, the computer monitor was at the top. So they could be at the same vertical.
They're both at 60. The problem is that the horizontal is a different frequency.
There's different amount of lines in a computer than on a TV screen. Even if it's
off by a couple of lines, You can't put the two together or so they thought and
that's why they would take the TV picture Cram it in a memory run it out at the
computer amount of lines. Does that make sense?
So what I did was actually I made a really idiotic thing I I made a thing that
would switch between showing you the picture from the vcr They're both starting at
the top of the picture at the same time So if you If you're a Superman and had
really fast eyes, you'd see this line starting at the both screens at the same
time, because I would sync the video recorder to the computer. Then I would just
basically throw a switch and show you a computer screen for 60th of a second. Then
I would show you this screen from the VCR. And it would flicker, but you'd overlay
the two. So if you looked at it, the two are superimposed. And it doesn't care
what the tape deck does. You can run the tape deck backward forward any speed you
want and it wouldn't the computer didn't care It doesn't know anything about the
video recorder or not locked together the The computers rock solid the VCR is not
and since I synced the two together you could do overlay So you could measure
what's called cardiac output You can measure a picture of the heart long axis and
you can do another when they did the ultrasound short axis You know how much the
heart's pumping out. So we started building computer analysis systems, which was the
off -growth. Then as we were building more and more computer systems, we realized the
real business is the video recorders. Because I could sell those to everybody that
makes these analysis systems that cost $8 ,100 ,000. And I could ship that.
You didn't have to ship a whole desk with an Apple II computer and a Bitpad and
monitors and disk drives. And software, no matter what you wrote in software, it
never satisfied the doctors. 'Cause you print out a report and you'd have a place
for the doctor to sign on the lower right and you get a call. Well, our doctor's
always signed on the lower left. Geez, your software is never finished.
'Cause no matter what you do, somebody out there is gonna say, well, I don't like
the background color. I don't like, has nothing to do with the basic thing that
you're trying to accomplish. So we got in the video recorder business and we ended
up doing probably about 85 % of the Catholics in the country had our recorders in
them. 'Cause we could get anywhere really fast and it had all these little cute
things like a normal VCR has buttons, it's stupid stuff. That's why everything's
upside down in life. You get a VCR, the buttons light up when you hit them. Well,
you're in a dark room, what the shit good is that? You want them to be lit before
you hit them. So we'd have them dim, and when you hit them, they'd go bright.
There's no which mode you're in, but you can see to hit the button. Otherwise,
you're in a dark cath lab, the lights are all off. And it's like, this is the way
VCR should be. And when you turn it off, the picture would loop through the VCR.
And it would, we even had it where the VCR was smart enough that in a floral lab,
when you swallow a cookie or you do what's called barium swallows, it would trigger
on the image. It didn't even need an interface and hardware. It would take the
video signal, the image, and it'll look at the image when it sees a picture come
on from the guy stepping on the x -ray switch. It would start recording it. And by
the way, we had the recorder, a normal VCR takes about seven seconds to get going.
And this is like one inch, you know, $100 ,000 Ampex recorders with big tapes and
big grill reels. Even a half inch tape, it takes seven seconds. It winds that goes
forward. We could start up in a seventh of a second from dead stop. And we'd stay
in pause for an hour and a half without hurting the tape. So we did all the
things you need in clinical and we had FDA approval. We had, there's certain
measurements of AC line linkage, all this technical garbage that you have to do to
be medically approved. But we met all those specs. And so we sold the Fajunkis out
of these things. We put a different, we kept up commercial recorder.
In fact, we were number two in the world outside of HP for buying those commercial
recorders, but we'd kind of, we'd do the Shelby Mustang thing to them. We would get
them and then we would soup them up and we'd put a cover where you couldn't drop
blood and the stuff into it. All the other covers were vented and did all the
right power cords and all that stuff. So we're building these VCRs and doing pretty
good with that. Then we did a lot with tele -radiography. We did a lot of sending
these images. That I'm so happy that we're out of that business 'cause you get
calls 24 hours a day. And some of them were good enough for stand -up comedy.
Doctors would call it two in the morning and like, you know, you gotta go to the
hospital and fix that transmitting machine. I'm not receiving pictures. And we were
able to call in, and this is back in the, you know, early '80s, like '84. You
could call in and Have it send me the pictures. I could take that hospital and
have it send to all the other hospitals All the other hospitals could send to me
but not one of them could send to the doctor and you go Well, I really think the
problems on your end doctor. Oh, no, it's not on my end. This is a brand new
computer It's a brand new computer. You've never used it with this software before.
Nope, but it should work Well, what modem do you have and at that time the
software For a lot of reasons, one's FDA says, this is what you're gonna use. This
is what it's been tested with. Does that make sense? And they have a list of four
modems that it would work with. And it only was guaranteed to work with those four
modems if it even did. So if it wasn't one of those four modems, you're on your
own and you're not legal either. And the guy goes, well, it's a so -and -so modem.
Modem's a modem. He goes, "Well, Phil, Phil, let's put some diesel in your car."
And it would be like these guys have gone to med school and they're working on
people, but you know, if everybody could send everybody else and nobody could send
to him from any hospital, where do you think the problem might be? It probably is
not at the hospital he's trying to get pictures from. So, so you get these things
at two o 'clock in the morning and this is like for years we did tele radiography
and small PAC systems. We'd send images from the ER up to radiology and ER to
pediatrics because that way you don't move the film around and now it's all digital
and it's gone further. So that went pretty good until you know basically 9 /11
happened. 9 /11 I've worked about 10 years without taking a vacation. So things were
real terse. We had by the way and all this is going on We amassed a huge amount
of real estate, like blocks of real estate, which we paid cash for. So we had all
these other businesses going. I had a liquor license. We had a bar. We had a high
-end stereo store. We were one of the first companies to really push laser disc
players. And we had 8 ,500 laser movies. and we'd run them for a dollar a night.
Well, if you had a big screen TV of 10 foot back in '84 and you played a
videotape on it, it'd be like watching rocks on a picture. It'd be so blurry. The
laser just looked pretty good and the sound was awesome. So because we had the
software, we had customers and because we had the software, we had the disc which
you don't have to rewind and never everywhere out. We sold more laser players out
of one little store in Slavic Village than the Sun and Circuit City for every store
in Ohio combined. So we did a landmark business laser disk.
It was great. And when DVDs first came out, I had a brother living in California,
I actually went off with Toshiba. And while all this is going on, I've been off
the Skywalker Ranch for THX and I ended up doing a beyond the consumer stuff.
I ended up being the tap representative for Ohio, which I could say now I'd go in
and, you know, evaluate the movie theaters that were THX. If that's the Thompson
home and experiment is what that stands for and Thompson home and was their heart
head of engineering for Star Wars and, you know, they did Star Wars, they went out,
listened to it in the theater, they go, this sucks. We've got got to put a
standard down so all the movies are the same and the same quality. And that's what
Lucasfilm was all about. So I would go and sit in the theaters and make sure
everything was working the way it should. And that included like the, the, the signs
on the bathrooms, what the parking lot looked like. It's all about if people go to
a THX theater, which is kind of not so much anymore. But at that time it was,
they have to pay a lot of money. And it's saying, it's like, you know, when you
go to McDonald's, you know what you're going to get. Maybe mediocre, but you know
what you're going to get. It's going to be the exact amount of pickles. You're not
going to get an extra pickle. You're not going to be one less and you're going to
get X amount of ketchup and mustard. It's going to be cooked at a certain
temperature at that atmosphere, at that height, and it's going to be the French
fries will always be cooked the same. So you know, when you go to a THX theater,
you know that it's going to be the exact same thing as it will be at another
theater in California, Canada, or wherever you go. So I would do that for a while.
So anyway, after 9 /11, I go, you know what? I am just tired, I've had enough of
this. I decided to kinda, and we had had a new invention that was pretty
pronounced. We were gonna build on an analysis system to look at X -rays digitally,
'cause It just came out with digital on viewing stations. The viewing stations were
half a million dollars. And I had one with a really cool thing. We'd build a
little device that would capture images from MRCT, nuclear ultrasonic, take 10 inputs
and send them to the tele radiography that was the older stuff. Everybody else is
trying to convert their ultrasonic machines to doing network stuff and selling them
that way, which is a lot of companies were doing that. I went the other way
because you couldn't change horses on a doctor be reading for four hospitals with
legacy software. And he couldn't do both at the same time. So we had a little box
that was pretty cool. So for about 20 grand, it was phenomenal profit. I think we
paid 200 bucks. 100. That was the software license. We had our own little computer.
All it had was a little green light on it and it ran a monitor that would show
what's coming from the CAT scanner and you would pick, you would adjust what's
called the window and level and the thing would take its own pictures, which is
really cool. So we had somebody, a major group was gonna buy us, give me a lot of
money, a lot of money and give me a really great salary. So for about a year we
danced with them and right when 9 /11 happened we were gonna actually do the deal
two weeks later and that stopped that deal and that group went from having 400
employees to having like now probably 10 so if I'd gotten on board with them it
probably would have been a downhill run for us anyway so with that I kind of set
back for a couple of years and repaired all the we I think we put about 3 500
VCRs into the marketplace across all the cardiac some of them in ultrasound We had
a fair amount in military a lot of research places used our VCRs and we kind of
made a name for it It was a real slick looking box. It was really cool. We did
all the trade shows We'd go to American Heart American College the RS &A we do all
the big trade shows around the country and knew all the head Radiologists that you
know Cedar Sinai and the Mayo Clinic and all these we had stuff everywhere and it
was great because we put it in the universities first and it would just spread,
they would tell their friends and it's a very close knit society and when we picked
up all the OEMs on our stuff, when you get a two million dollar lab, our VCRs
were $10 ,000 to $20 ,000. The competitors were $100 ,000, $80 ,000 and we outperformed
them. and our material, it was $600 for a reel -to -reel hour long tape,
ours was 20 bucks for two hours. So you do the math, you know, and you could
store 'em on a shelf, they were on real reels, you had to wind the thing, you
know, and put it in all that craziness. So Sony ended up buying video recorder from
us actually, but put with their analysis system because everybody went away from beta
and they certainly weren't gonna put a JBC or Panasonic or some other machine in
with their stuff. So, but putting on, you know, Ultronix Medical, you know, that's
different. So we had a great run with the VCR. So I sat back for a couple of
years, I just repaired the machines 'cause we had enough of them in the field and
it had been their mean failure time was eight years and people use these things for
a long time and I'd get them back and do a complete rebuild and and send them
out. It was one man show probably made more to my pocket than when we were running
the business because I didn't have all the overhead and all that stuff. So then
that finally kind of wound down a little bit. And then I've always had this passion
for audio. So the real story is we have an acquaintance and this acquaintance was
doing inner city preaching at the Cleveland Boys and Girls Club gym. Now,
if you've never heard anybody speak in a gym, it's less than ideal, right? It's
like Echo City. So you go in a gym, I would take a set of really good speakers,
they're a company called Tanoi, it's a real high end, they're like number two in
the studios worldwide outside of America, in a nice mixture and all this stuff, you
go to the back of the gym and you go, I have no idea what this guy is saying.
It's like just, it's like being in a cavern. And by the way, this guy was a
former drug dealer. And he had brought 160 people to hear to know Christ,
most of them as former customers. So he'd have this place packed because they're
giving them food and jackets and everything else. But I think a lot of the people
were there for the food, the jackets and all the stuff because they certainly
weren't hearing what he had to say. I'm there and I I don't understand what you're
saying. So I actually went home after a few of these little, you know, church
services on Sunday in the boys club gym. I go home and I pray about it. And
everything I've ever built, by the way, has been in lucid dreams. Whenever I've had
a problem, I've, well, slept on it. And in color, I'm a color dreamer, I would do
all the circuitry. If you ever watched like the prisoner of war things, you know,
yeah, all the circuitry, I'm working it all out my mind. And since I've done the
stuff in the military. And since I did the stuff with ultrasound and ultrasounds,
really kind of simple, it's called beamforming. And I could give you a quick
explanation. If anybody will put them to sleep out in the audience. - I know, I
would love to hear it. - Imagine, if you will, a perfectly flat pond, right?
There's no waves. If you drop a rock, as we all know, 'cause I think most of us
have dropped rocks in the pond, It goes out in waves, big circles. Now, if you
line up 10 people at the beach on that perfectly smooth pond, and you line them up
10 feet apart, and you have one guy drops a rock in the pond, and the next guy
counts the 20 and he drops a rock in the pond. And the next guy counts the 20
and he drops a rock in the pond. Those waves will combine, and you'll have a
perfect straight wave going off on a 45 degree angle to where the last guy drops
the rock can you imagine that I'm visualizing if you Start at the outer two guys
and they drop rocks at the same time and then the guy in the middle is the last
one They'll make a concave looking wave and that's how they focus ultrason is how
they fire those crystals there's usually 64 to 128 crystals and they fire them in
groups and so they so they can point it back and forth, and that's actually how 5G
works with their antennas. It's the delay between them, and that's how they focus
what they're doing. Okay, so if that makes sense. So what we came up with as a
speaker, if you have a line of speakers, say we've got nine speakers, and if you
put your head right next to the center speaker, that center speaker's only going a
couple inches to hit your ear, The one at the top is going a lot of inches to
hit your ear. So sound is very short wavelengths, and your human hearing is most
sensitive to time delay. If you change volume on something, you have to double the
volume for human. It could be 2 dB on professional people, but you've got to double
the volume. It's called 3 dB. You have to double the volume to perceive a
difference. So if you have 10 watch, you got to go to 20 watts. If you have a
radio that's a receiver that's 100 watts and you got one in 125, they're identical
by identical. You got to go to 200 to perceive it gets a little bit louder. So
you can see it, it starts using power really, really fast. You go one watt, two
watt, you're in the thousands before you know it. And frequency, everybody goes,
well, you know, James Taylor sounds a little bassy on those speakers. And you go,
Has he ever visited your house and sang to you without singing through a PA system?
You have no idea what James Taylor sounds like. You know, a piano sound like. You
know, what violin sound like, but most things in a movie is totally man -made. You
have no idea what that boom is supposed to sound like. And most things in people
singing, you have no idea what their voice sounds like 'cause you've never actually
heard them, right? So your idea of frequency is garbage. You don't have any idea
what's too high, too low, unless you've worked with the people. But time delay,
you're really sensitive to. If somebody talks at the right side of your standing on
your right side, it hits your right ear, and then a few itsy bitsy bit in time,
it hits your left ear. Same value. That little delay will tell you intensive a
degree where that person is standing in the room. That little delay around your nose
and with mine I've got a really big nose it's a big delay so my brain actually
calculates for that but on most people it's a short delay so maybe that's why I'm
a little bit better at hearing I got that big delay working for me so what happens
is that if you've got a line of speakers the top speaker is back in time so if
you gave it a pulse you'd see a bunch of pulses if you were to electronically look
at it it wouldn't be one pulse So it's like guys are rowing a boat and everybody's
kind of rowing there's you know There's nine guys and they're all rolling at
different speeds, but they're it's kind of moving forward You get sound coming out
of this thing, but it's blurry Can you picture that because things are arriving and
it's just like you've got double vision It's it's making everything smooch together
Well by time aligning the speakers and we're doing it passively in the speakers
companies have time -aligned speakers They put An amplifier on every single speaker
and they do the delays digitally and they it's a network thing and it takes time
So it's actually back in time. They can't do it at real time and what we do is
we have a secret sauce in our box to where When we send the sound they're all
time aligned so that the things got three and a half inch speakers That three and
a half inch speaker is very light and easy to move Okay All of them combined the
overall surface area is rather large when you put nine times the surface area of
the little one guy So you get this big thing moving really fast With a lot of
control, but it's all focused on the center speaker So when it sends sound out
instead of being 90 degrees up and down and 90 degrees side to side We're three
degrees up and down it shoots straight ahead and Almost nothing side to decide. So
we've got these, they cover the Cleveland Zoo with 10 of these. Oh,
wow. They go thousands of feet outdoors. And the volume when you're 10 feet away
sounds exactly like to your perception that when you're 1000 feet away,
and 180 degrees across. So we put one or two of them on a press box in a
football field. We've got them at Western of Academy. They've got them in their
chapel. They've got them on their soccer field. They've got them on their football
field. It will cover a whole football field. You could clearly hear it in the
visitor's side just and you could sit underneath it and be on this call because the
way that it focuses the sound and incidentally that's the whole thing like I put my
name upside down. When you go to a meeting, my big beef is most things are done
because this is the way people has always done them. You go in a meeting room, The
speakers are in the ceiling. I don't know anyone other than somebody deformed whose
ears point up your ears point forward You reject sound behind you So if it's above
you if you go home and you could try this put on it get two identical TV set one
behind you Put a program on watch the screen in front of you Play the sound from
behind you and if it's a movie you haven't seen you'll have follow in the movie,
even though it's crystal clear, because it doesn't sink. It's like when you look off
the road, you drive off the road. So localization is a big deal on intelligibility.
If somebody speaking in the sounds coming from where they're at, you think that's
them talking louder. It shouldn't sound like a PA system. Sounds should be natural.
And most sound systems, they everybody sounds
And you hear them on most sound systems because they have a horn and a woofer. The
woofer's got a lot of mass. And when you start the woofer moving back and forth,
it literally is going about 120 miles an hour, stopping dead and changing direction.
So it's got too much. If you take a train and try to stop, it isn't gonna stop.
But these little bitty speakers, they can stop on a dime. So the clarity is way,
way beyond what you'll get with a big speaker, but you get the same amount of air
all you care about at the end of the day is how much air can you move. And if
you don't try to go low frequencies, 95 % of all energy is 100 Hertz down.
That's like a low bump. Okay. So when you're trying to get a speaker that's a 15
or an 18 to go down, they can't, I don't think there's any can go down to 20
Hertz. They claim 20, but they really are doing 40 or 50 or 60. They can't do it
without doing another frequency that's like if they do 20, there's more 40 than 20.
So you hear a bass, but it's blurry. It's not like to do, to do it properly,
we'll have, we've taken like one of our line, our beam formers down to the canton
fairgrounds, and they had eight subwoofers. Each one would be the size of a small
refrigerator laying on its side and we could cover that fairgrounds with one of
these little stinking columns. They're only 40 inches long and they're six inches
wide, five inches deep and they weigh 17 pounds and they're weatherproof. So when we
went about building the speakers, we did it from A to Z. We made them 40 inches
long because their array is within a human hearing when you're sitting or standing
from 95 % of the people. And by being 40 inches long, when you do extrusions,
they're 10 feet. And if my great math skills from South High inner city is right,
that's three. So we don't like to waste stuff, you know, I'm not going to pay for
dumpsters, we are so frugal, it's unbelievable. So when we cut something, it's thirds
exactly. Okay. And when you ship stuff, because we plan on shipping Thousands and
tens of thousands of this because when people find out what we're doing all of by
the way all of our sales We've sold about 400 of these over the past few years
have all been referrals from our customers not even referrals We'll put him at VAS
for example VASJ on Euclid they call somebody in North Canada and say get up hi
this We did Alex Bevin buys it. He tells all this French. God, I hear these things
because they're outrageous. They're just so different than anything anybody's ever
heard. We'll put a microphone dead on the front of one of these things and scream
and knock at feedback. We go in and do a demo on a church. They just write you a
check and hand it to you. It's like, you know, it's like, what do you, all the
problems with sound is because people don't look at the problem from beginning to
end. And it's everywhere in life is that way. When you go in a shower. I always
use this example. You know, you reach through to adjust the heat of the shower. So
if it's scalding, you're reaching through the scalding water to adjust the shower.
Every bathroom is plumbed like this. And you go, well, if you ran the plumbing
another couple of feet, you could put the knob on the side or the backside of the
tub. Oh, but that's more plumbing. You just brought it 300 damn feet. What's another
three feet? You know, it's like stupidity. It's like you get in your car and you
know you have to have your headlights on when your wipers are on So since they
ever started making cars if you turn on your wipers your headlights you come on You
shouldn't have to do when you enter somebody on your iPhone and palm did this and
the UPS does it You enter somebody's address on your phone and it starts off in
the alphabet keyboard And you go How many people do you know whose address starts
with a letter? How many? The majority start with a number, and actually, if you put
in the zip code, it should automatically put in the city and state and all that
other nonsense, you know, and then you put their address and it should go straight
to the number pad because everybody's address starts with a number. So, most things,
most things are backwards. You go in a bathroom, right? So you go on an elevator,
you know, I got this little thing where you go in, you got to have a medical
exam, right? So you go in, the first thing, it's a two -story building, you go in
the elevator, what do you see? First floor, second floor, and you go, shit, what
floor am I on? You know, how do I get there? What's the other floor? Shouldn't
they just, and buttons cost a lot of money, right? So wouldn't it be better just
have one button that says go to the other floor, go to the other damn floor or
just go, you know, I mean, where are you going to go? If you're on one, you can
only go to two. If you're on two, you can only go to one. Well, I have button
one and two. I mean, to me, that seems like absurd, right? It's just like when you
do the pole vault backward, you know, the guy goes like, oh, damn, we've been doing
it wrong all along. Overhead speakers are horrible 'cause they gotta be up really
high in order to distribute. So you need an awful lot of them. And it costs money
to run stuff in the ceilings. In a gym, we did Beachwood High School with two of
our columns. We took down 12 of a three -letter company, starts with Jay. Much
better coverage, much better sound. We put a subwoofer in the corner. You'd swear
the sound's coming out of those little columns 'cause we go down to 100 hertz. We
don't try to do lows 'cause when you speak, a telephone goes from 300 to 3000 for
speech intelligibility, that's all you need. We go from 100 to 18 ,000 ruler flat,
that's one of the reasons the ruler flat on frequency and time more importantly,
that's why when we put a mic up right next to the speaker, it doesn't squeal
'cause it's exactly, if you look at people when they EQ, they cut down the
squealing frequency because it's actually hotter than the rest of the stuff. Does
that make sense? - So we've gone in a different way and plus the cabinets generate
sound. So we've got a cabinet that's dead or not doornail. We fill 18 little
chambers with something we call WAM, wave absorption material, so that when you dump
your hand on the side of the cabinet, it would sound like a music box. A music
box, you don't make any noise besides the sound coming out of the speaker. The box
creates its own sound, right? So its sound coming off the side of the box is
trying to kill the sound that's coming off the front of the box. We're real dead
in there. People don't realize that the sound on a speaker as loud as it is in
front of a speaker, and they fill in with fiberglass and all that. The back of the
speaker is the same cone, right? You can agree. The cone on the front is the same
cone, looking at the back of the speaker. So as loud as it is in your room at
loud volumes, it's that Loud in that little space behind the speaker. Yeah.
So what do you do with that energy? Well, we absorb it We turn it to heat
basically and then when you look at a grill everybody's familiar with the metal
grills on We're talking commercial speakers not home stuff. Okay. Yeah, you look at
a grill on a speaker Okay, it's got these little perforations. Well, if you take
that grill off and put underneath the water faucet You'll find out the air ain't
getting through there real good only 40 % of the air is getting through those puny
little holes trying to force itself through the holes. So it's bouncing back some of
that energy to the cone and then through to the inside of the cabinet, coming back,
hitting the cone again, hitting the face. So when you have a pulse, it just keeps
pulsing forever. What we did was we have bars, stainless steel bars that we powder
coat. And what they do is the sound comes out, it's like looking at just straight
bars like in a prison, because it's, you know, the sound wants to get out of this
gel cell, right? So they're round, and since it's round, it does the same thing as
an airplane wing. As it hits that round thing, it has to build up pressure on the
sides of that round bar. And then on the front side, it's got a negative energy.
So it actually goes and forms right back to what it was. You're not breaking in a
bunch of little holes all trying to fill up and all that. And by the way, it's
got frets just like on a guitar. The whole front of these things is a solid chunk
of aluminum. The outer box is plastic, 'cause plastic's weatherproof, dah -da -dah -dah
-dah -dah, it's got some great features. Plastic does, and it's indestructible pretty
much. In fact, we cover the whole thing with truck bed liner, and you could throw
it down the stairs, you could jump up and down on these things. The bar's being
stainless steel, you literally can lay out on its back and jump up and down on it.
But we don't disturb the sound, And we take the heat that's inside the box, 'cause
if you put a hundred watts to a speaker, consider it the same as a hundred watt
light bulb. So even if you know nothing about wattage, you know, if you grab a
hold of, if it's not an LED, you grab a hold of a hundred watt bulb, it's hot.
These speakers can handle 350 watts. Damn hot in the cabinet, 95 % of that energy
turns to heat, not sound, 95%. So you have to filled, you know,
those little heat lamps, that's what's going on inside the box where we heat up the
front baffle. It goes up those little frets every, you know,
however it is, I think we got for them. And it goes up the bars and then the
speakers are blown over the bars and cooling theirself. So everything about it is,
you know, so anyway, my whole thing in life is to change the world. So we probably
have not grown the company as much as we should, 'cause I'm truly a Steve Wozniak.
I'm about changing the world for intelligibility. And I don't think we're in the
speaker business. We're in the communications business. As I mentioned, I know an
awful lot about video. And I had the second Mac in the world.
I modified a three tube projector and Steve Wozniak sat next to me. We projected a
35 foot screen with what's called a hundred looms, which is like dim as shit But
that was considered a big deal back then those three tubes had the liquid in front
of them It was boiling the liquid to do that three CRTs But I was able to make
it sink to what the Apple computer puts out, which is 23 kilohertz Standard video
is 15 kilohertz. It was able to show and he still remembered that he came to
Cleveland here a few a few years ago, he has downed, I had not seen him since '87
or since '84. I'd met him before then in the '80s, in the '70s before the Apple
thing, before the Macintosh thing. But in '84, they brought the Mac to Cleveland and
we were the second group to see it. The Boston users group was first to be in
existence. Cleveland was second. We had over a thousand members. So at Independence
High School, we had a thousand people and, you know, the fire department didn't
know, but we unplugged all the lights because you had to have it really dark in
there. We didn't have any lights. None of it. None. It was pitch black in there,
but you're able to see it. And Steve sat next to me and he says, that's the best
picture you'd ever saw outside of a huge light valve, which is the only thing that
would present that picture. And I think they were about $80 ,000 and 84. So, You
know my little homemade switch thing. I'd switch it for normal video or for high
death and it worked So so he came to EJ Thomas EJ Thomas.
Is that the place in Akron? He came there a few years ago and spoke and he gave
his story. It's a great story He's he's a really funny guy if you ever get a
chance to meet him In fact, I'll tell you a story about Steve from the 70s after
I've known this little spiel so and that's part of the spiel so we get free
tickets So there's a whole bunch of us come down. I've got a good friend We go
down and EJ Thomas seats 3 ,500 people and they're in long rows and exit at the
end that are rolls So when you come down, everybody comes in from the side. You're
all across. It's a great auditorium So Steve's up front. He gives us feel about how
he started Apple Computer and all that stuff. It's all about passion. It's all about
loving. And Steve is all about making the world a better place. So at that meeting,
they go at the end and I talked to the girls that sat us and I said, "Well, you
know, I gotta tell you, you know, there's a time when Steve gave me the best laugh
of my life in the 70s." And she goes, "Well, how's that?" And I go, "Well, we're
in the Jarvis center in New York City. And I didn't know Steve, but Steve's in
front of us. Imagine the brightest yellow jacket you can imagine with the was
embroidered with five inch thick big letters. The was a big semi circle.
You picture that? Sure. Yeah. And he's walking with six or eight of the guys from
Apple. Apple was probably doing about a hundred million a year in sales. They
weren't a giant company. Apple was just kind of getting started. And at that time,
you'd go to the trade show and people have folding tables with little boards and
stuff that they'd make. We had four guys from our Apple users group went and they
had boots. One of the guys had a little thing for, it's almost like a notcher that
the kids use for your paper route, that the floppies cost 25 bucks a piece for
120K of data. Well, the It's the same material so you can put a notch in it and
flip it over and save 25 bucks So he's selling those things for like 10 bucks or
something So Steve would stop at every table look at what they were doing and
generally write a check if he liked it Which I doubt most people ever cash, so
he's making off both ways he gets the product Hey, he's he feels morally obligated.
He's paid you whether or not you ever collect them what so he stops at one booth
And there's myself with probably 20 guys. And he looks down at the booth, he picks
up a little printer interface card, a little PC card that would fit in the Apple
too. And he looks at it, he's turning it over, he loves to look at the way the
artwork is, 'cause he designs, you know, he puts chips on things and he looks at
the chip and he goes, this is an 83502 or whatever the part number was, it's
called a peripheral interface adapter. He says PIA, for profiles is the printer.
Okay interface is the interface of the computer and it's an adapted to computer so
you can plug in a printer to the computer and have it send data back and forth.
He looks at this thing and says, "The only problem with that chip is it has
trouble handling the interrupt sum than 31." The guy reaches up, grabs it out his
hand and goes, "What the f do you know about computers?" And he looks down at the
guy, doesn't say a word. He looks up to the ceiling, which is like 60 feet tall.
He humps his shoulders and walks down the aisle. And everybody is laughing so hard.
I thought I was gonna piss my pants. I get to the end of the row. I swear I
thought I broke a rule. I'm sitting leaning against the wall. Tears are pouring down
my face. And for months after that, I'd be out with my friends. We'd be sitting
eating breakfast or lunch or something. And then somebody would look over at somebody
else and go, what the F do you know about computers? And here this guy said, he
is show. He is show. And he doesn't know who he is.
I mean, that to me. So we tell this girl that and she goes, well, you know, why
don't you go down there? I've got like 10 rows between this roped off to where the
podium is. And then the first row with my friend. 'Cause 'cause that's for all the
college people, all the dignitaries, so we're down there. He gives us a spiel, a
spiel's incredible, talking about how he started and how he worked with Steve Jobs
and all this. And at the end they go, well, is there any questions? He'll take a
couple of questions now. So one of the guys with this jumps up and he says, I've
got a DVD from the video tape when you came in '84 and showed the Mac to our
users group and I'd like to give you a copy of that. And he goes, well, you know,
actually Apple, Steve Jobs didn't want to have users groups because he was all about
tying everything in and not letting people mess with the things. So the Macintosh
was a totally closed architecture, the Apple, and Steve to this day, it's to share
with mankind. It's all open, told you the DOS, he told you all the software, you
can make the thing do anything you wanted to. So we're down in the front, so he
says that, and then he says, "Any other things?" And I pop up and he goes, goes,
I remember you. So what are you doing down? I go, I'm building speakers that don't
give echoes and big echo areas, and don't give feedback. And they go, Great,
that's super. I'm glad things are doing well for you. And they go, Well, that's the
end of the question. Two questions. Everybody's empty in the place out. The girl
comes over, she goes, Are you going to go back and see him in the green room? I
go, What green room? She goes, Well, it's on the other side. Well, we had to go
all the way out because the edges are from the sides and all the way around the
building, so we get in line, right? There's all these people on the person letting
the people in to the green room that's backstage says, "Well, you don't have an
orange ticket." And the guy that ran the place was a guy named Adol. And he looks
at me and says, "He knows him. Let him go back." So I go in the back and there's
a buffet line. everybody's over there, he's talking to one guy. So I go up and I
talk to Steve, I get his card, his personal card with his phone number and all
this stuff, and we chat for a good while. And sure enough, he emails me the next
day. It's great. But we're two of a kind. And my thing with this business is not
taking off as well as it should, because I'm about communications. I'm about what's
in my brain to appear in your brain as Disturbed as possible, but if you got a
friend, you know, whatever comes out of your mouth and lands on their ears Is not
what your mouth put out So when you're communicating be it because of race
differences or ethnic differences or religious differences or Background whether you're
poor or rich even language. We don't think in letters and we don't think in letters
and Visually, so if you've got really poor visual like like everybody does
PowerPoints, ask backward. They should be forced to look at a projection screen,
the size of what they're gonna use in a room and totally do their PowerPoint on
that screen, 'cause everybody puts a little bit of shit you can't read from the
back of the room. So it's just wasting everybody's time and people are watching the
PowerPoint rather than the person speaking. They're looking at that and it's looking
at you to get you involved with the people Because it's that eye contact this shows
you the soul of a person and it's the facial expansions and we miss that We miss
out on that. So communications is about what's in my brain to be able to formulate
in your brain So we're both in sync about what we're talking about and you know
that and especially after doing telepathy and all the stuff I've done in medical and
other things you go you're talking about one thing They're imagining something totally
different, you you know, when you talk to your dog, he kind of gets it food in
his name. But they get it. They can sense when you're not feeling good. They can
sense when you're angry. Because we have abandoned that because of all of our
speech. We're so busy. Of course, here I am talking away and I'm not giving you a
chance to say anything, but we don't really listen to other people. We don't really
convey information. I want to make the world a better place. So I'm not the kind
of guy to build the business and it will build on its own in spite of me. You
know, it always has. But I'm not about profit and I'm not about, I believe fully,
I'm in the inner city of Cleveland, Slavic Village. I've done a lot with that was
the Lieutenant Governor for the Qantas and all this, I'm more about giving. I'm a
giving person, there's different kind of people. But I believe that if you help
other people, you're gonna make it in the world. 'Cause That's really all that
matters is at the end of the day your network is your network your net worth is
your net work But it's knowing that you've had other people meet their goals and
accomplish what they want accomplished and help them That's the best. That's the best
feeling you could get What are the questions we have?
How long are we going already? How are you ready? I don't we're just getting
rolling here. So Cleveland is always when it comes to software they're all about
everybody's about software software software software and those companies I would I
would I would dare say a lot of them it's like that hockey stick and then it
falls back the other way or they sell out and they move out of the city they move
out of Cleveland some of the biggest companies as soon as they grow they're out of
here manufacturing is the backbone of this country It really is but it's like a
it's like a bastard child. You know - and we're not we've never looked for
investment In fact, we've always been totally cash. We've not we've owned all of our
vehicles We own like a you know a couple million worth of test equipment We're and
that's part of why we're successful because we're able to actually prove things the
way it should be and We're clever. We're not smart, but we're really clever. So
It's it's all about building communities and people so you can't say you want to
support the inner city and support people to make Their lives better and then do it
out in the suburbs because right now especially people don't even there's no
transportation out there So the company's out in the sub and far out there. There's
no way for people to get there to work You want to help people enrich their lives?
I've never had anyone work for me They've always worked with me. And when we were
building the recorders, we have a little sign up says, we had two of them, the
next person this machine is going to be used on as your kid, or your grand kid,
because sometimes when the kids are teenagers, you go work shit, you know, it's
pretty rough with kids, right? I mean, when my daughter first got her first house,
I'm a great grandfather, by the way, I don't look at people on the radio can't
tell how loud I am. So, I definitely have a face for audio, don't I? I definitely
have a face for audio. So, I belong to AES, by the way. We need to get an AES
group going here, the Audio Engineering Society. I was on a Zoom with them yesterday
there in Columbus. We got to start at Cleveland One. And you got to come to my
lab. We've got a theater in the basement better than anything in Cleveland. We did
one movie theater. We did one Ohio. People say we put the loud and loud inville.
It's not loud. But what it does do is it's got 10 of our speakers, which is
outrageous because it's got three stories. So you have to do that since we're so
straight ahead, you have to have something up high or you don't get anything on a
football field that three degrees will hit the other side. Does that make sense?
Because of the distance. So it's like perfect for football fields or soccer fields.
So anyway, we made their basement into a subwoofer in this old theater. It's the
kind like, you know, the palace and all these you gotta look at this place and do
phenomena. See, I've gone down there three times. We'll actually go down on a Sunday
and watch a movie because the sound is insane and it's only 5 .1. It's not at
most. It's not seven one, but the sound is insanely good. And it's you could sit
anywhere in that room. You could sit next to the left surround and hear all the
other speakers. Most theaters if you sit all the way up at the front right you
can't hear the center channel. There's right center left across the front you can't
hear it. You can hear every speaker no matter where you sit it sounds the same
volume. So if you're sitting all the way down on the front you clearly hear that
left and we only got to put one speaker on each side not the whole row coming
down. It's been three times I've been down there where somebody will have the sound
of a shotgun, and everybody in the damn theater jumps out of their seat, looks at
every other person and laughs. Because the sound is so tight and so dynamic. If I
set off a shotgun behind you, Jeff, I can guarantee you will not stay in that
seat. It may be a wet spot where you sat, but you will not be in that seat,
you'll jump. And it's natural if a fire cracker goes off behind you, but theater
sound doesn't do that generally. It's loud. It's boomy. It's hissy. It's it's it's
good sound. Don't get me wrong theaters have very good sound But they cannot do
live sound and movie sound over the same system They do live acts from Nashville.
They do plays they do school plays that same system You could run a mic out and I
get feedback if you put a mic on the speaker system in a theater It's gonna howl
beyond belief because they don't need to be flat They want to really impressed you
with the highs and the lows and the mid -range. It wants to just be in your face.
Does that make sense? When you go and listen to a movie theater, it's like right
in your face. It's real sizzly and real. In fact, since the '50s, they've got a
little thing called the X -Curve. They increased the highs 2 dB per octave starting
at 2 ,000. It gets more and more highs. To reach the back of the room, the highs
get eaten up because of the room. So it's sizzling when you're up front
And that's that's built into all movies is the x -curve it's part of the the format
and to put it in your home There there's one soundtrack for DVDs. They're all too
bright So if you have a THX sound system, they actually have an equalizer to take
that back out and makes it normal for your house Because it's made for a big space
and you're using it in a small space and the other systems all of it real sizzly
and it's very, it's like fingers on a chalkboard. You're impressed at first, but it
wears you out. Well, manufacturing here for hardwares is hardwares that are a lot
tougher than anything else. But we've got eight suppliers. We don't build everything
ourselves. We've got a place that laser cuts the metalwork for us. We have somebody
that powdercoats stuff for us. Things are TIG welded. You know, everything about it.
We've got other people supplying us. That's all made in Ohio, baby. Veteran owned
made in Ohio. Yeah, we're proud of what we do. Oh, it's it's an incredible story.
Yeah. Our future is, you know, everybody goes, Well, maybe you'll be bought out by
that four letter company starts with B and or the three letter company and actually
Harman, which owns JBL and 48 other sound companies, including Crown Amplifiers they
were bought by Samsung a couple years ago Well, a lot of that stuff was made in
China and when that happened I go do you really believe the South Koreans are going
to get in bed with the Chinese and They very quickly took a lot of the stuff to
Mexico very quickly, but they bought Harmon was bought specifically because Harmon
owns a Gob of patents for near field communications. And if you're gonna have cars
self -driving before, besides the LiDAR stuff, if people are familiar with that or
the cameras, you have to have near field communications. Like say, if you're driving
on the freeway and a car comes off of a bridge in front of you, everybody from
miles back has to know that happened. Then it's much better than you could ever
respond as a human. It automatically telegraphs it. Just like when you're on ways it
knows when the traffic stopped two miles ahead that near field communications is why
they bought that company they did a it was like an eight billion dollar thing and
when you really think about it that uh what was that silly thing that they're the
virtual reality guy that they were doing on all the iPhones for a little bit they
were chasing them all through the parks and everything about five or six years ago
everybody was chasing this little guy that would appear on rocks and you could get
them and they were running all over the country doing it. People were walking in
front of cars. They did the Pokemon stuff. The Pokemon. It was in the billions and
they didn't make anything. It was in the billions for Pokemon. In the billions they
were doing. In the billions. So when you look at them doing something with one of
these 48 sound companies, if it's not gigantic, I don't know that they have interest
in the big commercial stuff. They're going to still be making some of the really
big arena stuff. There's only so many arenas and so many gigantic, you know, rock
concerts and stuff. They're more interested in the big number guy. They're not going
to be interested in little pity stuff. So I think we're at an opportunity time.
Omar Bose is gone. Clipsch has been gone for a while. And the people that started
most of these major, there's only a few sound companies doing commercial. Billions
doing you know retail residential stuff. I mean, there's so many speaker companies
out there. It's unbelievable But not in commercial not in commercial and we've got
other cute things about ours First we'll hang with two screws on the wall and you
hang it and you put a padlock you unlock the padlock you lift it up It runs we
could go 500 feet with telephone wire with telephone wire and not lose Enough
volume, or you could perceive it's gotten softer, not lose two decibels at 500 feet
of telephone wire and copper is expensive. So you can actually wire up a church or
in a place with a staple gun like they used to use to run your telephone wire, we
run on telephone wire, and we're passive, we don't have to plug it in. We don't
need a computer to run it. So we've we've addressed everything that's the negative
things about speakers. But it's more than that. We've got a whole vision about what
we're going to do in the future We've got some some great things we want to do in
education because that's really where the passion is we got to get the kids to have
a great education and a great work experience and Really be able to connect with
each other and connect with the teacher and you can't connect with a teacher in a
classroom Anything that's over 60 feet. You can't communicate. You're either shouting
And the kid in the back of the room doesn't get an education. I feel blessed my
name starts with an A. Geez, I was in the front row. So I got the best education
going just because I start with an A. You know, hey, what's the odds of that
happening? And it's a weird name. Altar is so much different than anybody else. You
put ALTHAR, I'm the first day on the web. I don't have to do any SEO stuff. We're
right at the top, right at the top. We figure we'll end up and all those other
companies and make them a little division of ours. Yeah, you know, that's that's
what I tell people by them, we're going to buy them. And you got to think big.
I'm on a thing, you should join this too. I'm on a thing every Friday night with
Jeff Hazel. He was the head of all marketing worldwide for Kodak, Eastman Kodak
worldwide. And he has a group called C -Suite Network. That's by invite. And it's
people from all of the world. And I'm on there every Friday night, we get to get
together. But they have meetings at the beginning of the month, and they'll have the
lady that does all the buying for the Navy. We'll talk. And now when you talk,
but you're on zoom, where you could actually talk face to face with that person.
It's not just and the same they've had the person from General Motors in charge of
their big stuff. And you're talking to him one on one. So the friends I've made,
I've got a friend that, you know, he sells a gentleman's cigars, he's got a trolley
that's in Nashville, Tennessee. And so I've gone to visit those guys. And you just
meet people. It's I was over in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago, meeting with one
other people. And it's actually I got a free ride. I did the sound down in Disney
Road last year. For an event with I think they had 6000 on the web and about a
hundred people at the diner. And they had the guy from Mickey Mouse. He's older
now, obviously. And I did the sound and the video down there. And I got paid for
my whole thing to go down for a free vacation, a really fancy hotel and all that
because of C -Suite. So you really got to reach out and expand. I think Cleveland,
everybody looks at Cleveland, they go, "Oh, you got to go out to the But I think
we've got so much brain power here and so much talent because of the medical,
obviously, because of our industry and because we have a heart. It's a passion. It's
really a passion that people want to build businesses and help each other out. I
don't care. And everybody is important in the world. I don't care whether somebody
is washing dishes or what their job is. Their job is just as important as anybody
else's. And you know when you're in in military, that jet fighter ain't gonna go
without that JP4 fuel. And if the guy didn't have the dishes washed and he gets
Montezuma's revenge, it's tough to fly a fighter. And if he doesn't have his radar
and his weapons don't work. So every single person is just as important as the
next, they're either here to benefit you or to give you a lesson of what you
shouldn't be doing. So everybody's important. We got a treatment like they're
important. That's a beautiful way to look at the world So I'm sorry. I didn't give
you a chance
It's the highest in the county we have a 42 foot waterfall if the powers would be
it's it's twice the size of the screw and falls one and it's Where is that way
right inside a village? It's called Mill Creek Falls, and the metro park spent $2
million building walkways and stuff. It's freaking crazy great. Our metro parks,
that green necklace that we have is unfriking believable, that you can go out and
within a minute be right there in nature. Nature's phenomenal. And you know what we
need to do more of is, since the beginning of time, people sat around and told
stories. Everybody's life has a story and every one of them is worth hearing. And
to just sit around and break bread is there's nothing better. It was all Wozniak.
And Woz is, he's real involved with First Robotics. I've been with them for 16
years. I'm one of the judges for first. And if you ever want to be inspired about
the future, you think of what the kids are like around the country and you think
these kids are just got their nose set in the middle their their face is stuck in
an iPhone or Android or whatever they're playing with but when you when you deal
with them in first robotics and you see the creativity of what they do they build
is everyone should just look up first I'm not gonna tell what's about I'm gonna
make everyone go to first FIRST robotics look and see what these games are about
and what these kids build in six weeks. It's insanity. It's the future of our
world. And I work with the inner city kids, and I got to tell you, 5 % or 3 %
are total bozos. The rest, they're just kids trying to make it by. They have some
difficult backgrounds. I like the feel that I've got a really crappy background. You
only heard part of it. Anyway, any other thoughts, any questions, Jeff? I've not You
haven't asked any questions.
And you told me you were going to take the job of, that John and Carson or what's
his name that's on TV now. I don't know that I've, I've needed to ask any
questions. I could, I could imagine that you are able to kind of speak to all the
things that you see in the world that are done because it's the way they've always
been done. Hello, - Whoa, every day I look at stuff and I go, what in the hell
are they thinking? And it's everywhere. I mean, it's literally everywhere. And it
comes from people doing what's always been done. It's like when they stop a car,
they either have brake shoes or disc pads. So you're telling me the very first
people ever built cars were that damn smart and here we are, you know, decades
later still stopping them in the same damn way. or let's say if you didn't have
rubber how would you make the how would you gotta imagine whatever you're leaning on
for your technology imagine to yourself what if we didn't have that technology how
could we accomplish the same thing that's when you end up with things that's beyond
what you're doing now because any technology it's better and better and better till
it reaches like a brick wall then it can't get no better makes sense but then you
stand back and you look at it like right now in a good example, a lot of the
stuff that we're relying on because of supply, we can't get. So you're going to
very quickly find that we're going to find better ways and someone will end up
being better than what we've been doing because this is the way we've always built
this. And when you do it a different way, you might find out it's actually a
better way of doing it. Yeah, it's just unfortunate that sometimes it takes the
catalyst of something truly catastrophic to give you that deliberate pause. Well,
I mean, Dennis, this was an enlightening conversation.
I think we could probably talk for many more hours, but. - Oh yeah,
but you said hour and a half, so I'm still got six minutes, we gotta beat the
other guys. - Well, I'll ask you a closing question then, 'cause I am curious, when
you think about all of the problems that you observe in the world, why is it that
you chose to focus on this audible literacy and communication when I imagine you
really could have tackled any variety of problems? I'll give you my take on
business. Is that okay? Is the final word? Sure. I will present to you that trains
are in the same business as McDonald's. Do you know what that business is? And
everybody always goes, "I'm in a real estate business 'cause they watched the movie."
Do you know what McDonald's real business is and what made them explode? They shift
time. When you go to McDonald's, you could grab a Big Mac and be on the turnpike
and you've just saved yourself a half an hour to an hour of time that day. So all
the fast foods, what they're really selling is time -shifting. When they did the
drive -throughs, it's 86 % of their business. And in COVID, the Wendy's, McDonald's,
and all those places have never done better business. In fact, the rallies and
places like that, and there's McDonald's that still aren't open up inside because
they realize they're making better money by just the drive -through. And they're
really in the time -shifting business. That's how come blockbusters is gone and
netflix it's the time of picking up that dvd and picking it back so anything that
shifts time is valuable if you've got a cat scanner that can do a slice three
slices a second versus one that does one a second even if the images are exactly
the same you don't think it's that much faster but over a year that's a lot of
patience but it's it's interesting because the as much as Those are our saving time
I feel like in a lot of ways the the businesses of today are in the are in
competition just with other things that you do just and your time right like Netflix
is in competition with sleep with with your physical activity with your work right
it's as much as their saving time they're trying to absorb your time. Exit that
third that's their job is to absorb your time So anything that shifts time, if
you've got an NC machine that can crank out parts twice as fast as another and
it's 50 % more expensive, it's cheaper, right? If you're punching out, so you're
really paying for time is a valuable thing. 'Cause in reality, all of us are fine
ant creatures. So on the back of your brain, you know that it's say you were to
live forever, you could never ever die. Nobody would ever be in a big rush because
it wouldn't matter. You know, it wouldn't matter. So anything that shifts time is
very valuable because the most expensive thing that exists is time. Steve Jobs
couldn't about one more minute of his life for a billion dollars. All you have is
time and it's limited. And anything that affects your senses, anything that goes in
your eyes, your nose, your ears, your mouth and gets converted to dopamine and
endorphins. That's sex, drugs, rock and roll. And anything, why would you go and pay
good money for a meal or go to a concert or listen to music in an elevator, as
bad as it is. But anything that affects our senses, 'cause we seek out things. They
always talk about this business thing. If I hear one more time, they say, what's
the pain point? Do they miss all the pleasure point? You don't get comfortable seats
because of pain you get comfortable. You'll seek comfort. You'll seek good things
You'll run away from pain So do you want to only sell because of the pain point
or do you want to have things where it's a pleasure point and people feel Good
about what you're what you've got People love music. Why would they sell all those
CDs or streaming or all this because we're wired for sound We're And it makes
dopamine and dolphins when you eat a good meal you go damn that pizza was rocking,
right? So anything that affects your senses anything that affects time shifting and
anything that affects eagle and pride Why do you wear the Rolex watch? It's the
same time as your I make the mouse Apple watch. Why do you drive the Porsche?
Because first gives you the thrill of the speed saves time and and ego all rolled
into one little piece, and people will trade one for another. You'll go to Cedar
Point and wait a half an hour for that damn demon drop and you're trade time for
that thrill. So I present that most things in life are going to affect your senses,
shift time or effect ego that covers a lot of things when you really peel away,
but things are about a hundred percent. But a lot of things, if it's shifting time,
we hang our speakers and two screws in their home. Everybody else is there for
days, rent the scissors lifts and stuff here. These, the highest they ever goes 10
feet off the ground in a gym, you could do that from a step ladder. Well, Jeff,
we've got to meet, you've got to come by and visit my lab 'cause you're going to
be astounded when you see this. - I would love that. - This is a cool place. Oh
wait, I can actually zoom out and see some of this stuff here. Oh my God.
So I have to try and describe what just happened for everyone listening,
which was for the entirety of our conversation for the last hour and a half.
It was like a normal zoom where you, you see someone and they're, they're right on
the other side of the screen. And what Dennis just did is he zoomed out And this
entire conversation, he was maybe like four tables away, incredible,
incredible. We got all the toys here. We got more toys than Cutters got Liverpool's
actually when I do zoom, we got 100 inch screen to watch the main speaker. So this
is this is what our place looks like. Wow. It's a lot of a lot of cool stuff. It
is. It is very cool for for those without the visual aid. Well,
Well, Dennis, if folks have anything they would want to follow up with you about
philosophically, audio, or otherwise, what is the best way for them to do so?
My email, and my name's always upside down on my email, so I don't know if you've
seen it yet. But anyway, author, a -l -t -h -a -r, audio,
a -u -d -i -o, at gmail All our audio Gmail and all our audio Com is the website
all our audio comm Jeffrey you got to come here break bread We'll have a great
time. You got to see a movie in our theater We've only got six thousand DVDs and
a few thousand lasers so but it's full at most it's it's got the whole spiel It's
I look forward to it pretty good. Yeah. Well Dennis. Thank you. Thank you so much
really appreciate it. God bless Jeff.