Bo Brinck DPA Microphones Global sales support manager
Brad Price Audinate Senior product marketing manager
Tell us about how you ended up working in the audio space. I started out a few decades ago as a keyboard player in a band. That was back in the day when we were recording two- and four-track audio. As I started to learn more and began getting known in the local scene, other larger bands hired me as their sound engineer, and I worked with 24-track audio. At that point, I was hired to build a music studio for the county community centre so that local youth could learn about audio. That was a fantastic challenge for me. I had some of the skills needed, but I also had to work with a lot of others in the business to make sure the studio was properly set up. I had to dive into different types of mics and audio equipment; it was fantastic. What is one piece of advice you would give to anyone hoping to start out in audio? Challenge what you hear from established sound professionals in the industry. Sometimes they have the right solution, but every so often there are different ways to do things. Many of us are working from old knowledge and ideas ― we have biases and habits. No one has worked with all the mics and audio equipment available in the world, so perhaps there is another way they haven’t seen before. Always think about if there might be a better way of doing something, and ask: ‘Why do you do it that way?’ Toughest professional challenge you’ve overcome? I travel around the world, educating sound engineers about mics and audio solutions. Sometimes it can be difficult to challenge them in their methods and ways of working, which can be hard to overcome.
Generally, I make sure I have the facts right. I learn from other experts around the world, test the information I pick up and do experiments to see if I agree or if I can find another way of doing things. I am privileged to work around many fantastic sound professionals all the time, and am constantly learning. What is your most essential piece of kit? My DAD AX32 recording interface coupled with a stereo pair of DPA 4006 omnidirectional mics are essential to my workflow. I use this equipment all the time, especially as my reference point when I’m doing comparisons. I know this set-up very well. It’s very transparent and has an extreme dynamic range, so it works well in many situations. I do this type of recording a lot because it’s how I challenge myself and the other experts I work with to really listen for the difference between audio samples. Without reference recordings, it is difficult to objectively hear the contrast. What audio technologies are you excited about for the future? I am excited about immersive sound systems for recording and playback. I’m fascinated with the ability to pick up true, natural sound in 3D. DPA mics are currently being used in a few of these endeavours, and I enjoy hearing about amazing audio being captured in this way. I am a true sound nerd, so I have a rather good TV set-up in an optimised room with high-end surround-sound capabilities. I can’t wait to upgrade it with an immersive home system in the next few years. The tech is out there, it just needs to mature a bit and become more mainstream.
Tell us about how you ended up working in the audio space. I’m a lifelong musician and was deep into my record collection in high school, which got me interested in acoustics, wanting to know how and why everything worked. When I went to college, I majored in electrical engineering and focused on acoustics. I even taught it with Professor Bose for a year, which was fun. It was just my interest in music in particular; playing guitar was a big part of it because I did that for a living for a long time. What is one piece of advice you would give to anyone hoping to start out in audio? Do it because you love it. Find some aspect of audio that really interests you and then go deep on it. There are many ways to be involved in audio – pro AV installation, music production, performing artist and many more. My angle was getting a solid technical understanding of audio from a deep standpoint of physics and human perception. That – for me – was the thing that made audio appealing. Toughest professional challenge you’ve overcome? My challenges have much less to do with audio and more with just working for small, dynamic companies like Audinate. I’ve had to wear many hats over my career, often jumping in and figuring out something new to me to get the job done. What is your most essential piece of kit? Depending on the application, it’s either my MacBook Pro or Fender Telecaster. What audio technologies are you excited about for the future? The technology I’m most excited about is spatial audio. It’s in its infancy, and we’re seeing a lot of stuff happening with Dolby Atmos and companies like Apple promoting spatial audio in their music ecosystem. It’s a long-standing bugaboo of mine that I’ve always thought that two-channel audio is intrinsically data starved, because it doesn’t have enough spatial information to really get the job done. But we’re used to it. Two-channel audio was technically plausible in the late fifties – little else was, really – so it made sense that we migrated to it. But I think that in terms of delivering exciting, immersive audio realism, you’ve got to have this spatial component.
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