Coming of Digital Age: Paul Frindle Part II

Like everything else that Paul worked on, as much of a landmark as the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be merely a stepping stone.  Where it was leading to however could have been radically different.  “I think there was a fantastic opportunity to revive the large studio concept by integrating non-linear storage and editing into the OXF-R3.  It was already a massively powerful workstation, wide open to accept it. This would have been amazingly powerful and creative, and would have knocked underpowered workstations off the map for many years to come, restoring a much needed differential to the elite studios against the up-coming project studios. I used to jump up and down enthusing about such ideas back then, and in the absence of any positive response from our controllers, I waited with bated breath for some other company to jump on this massive opportunity. But amazingly none ever came. It was incredible, disappointing and depressing.“

Fortunately there was another avenue of exploration left for Paul, that would give his work its broadest audience to date.  “The design of the OXF-R3 was amazingly ahead of time and forward thinking in its concept. It was really a great big highly flexible processor with a whole load of software running on it, which was restricted and presented on a panel just for conformity and convenience. It was already ‘software in a box’. It could even be controlled remotely and the all the design systems and debugging tools I was using on it consisted of on screen GUIs. I was warning that the OXF-R3 product concept was obsolete even before we had finished it. The large digital tape recorder was nothing more than a very costly and highly delicate ‘bit bucket’ organised like an analogue machine, which lacked real integration and flexibility. The large console was becoming the reserve of just a few high profile artists that could demand and afford it.  With the meteoric rise in performance of digital technology, it was fairly easy to envisage a time when a unit bought for £1000 would be capable of doing a large chuck of what a mixer needed.  In the near future we would be able to make art without all this paraphernalia at a miniscule fraction of the cost. I was far more excited about this than doggedly hanging onto established formats and design constraints.”

Not one to let this excitement lay dormant, Paul and a few others started their own pursuit.  “The plug-ins project was initially hatched from humble beginnings, almost by us working in our spare time and at nights. My colleague actually did the first proof of concept EQ plug-in over the Christmas break and it all grew from that.  Looking around at what was available on ProTools it seemed that what people needed most was the kind of high quality, refined and indispensable applications that all mixers needed. So the EQ and Dynamics were adapted for ProTools to provide those functions. Making them identical to the OXF-R3 applications would provide a good link to our existing reputation. Of course running these in 48bits for TDM or double float in RTAS actually provided better performance than was available in the OXF-R3 32 bit fixed point environment. And it has to be said that we ironed out a few bugs along the way too, so these were actually better than the applications in the large format console.”

For users this resulted in what are still being called the best Equalizer and Dynamics processing plug-ins.  For Sony however, the greatest deliverable was the modular system they built to create both the OXF-R3 and the plugins.  “It was a complete hierarchical graphic design system running on a specially designed processor, which allowed real time interaction and analysis of the action for almost every instruction in your processing design! So not only did it allow engineers without formal programming skills to build highly complex applications, it also very crucially allowed us to experiment freely and actually listen to what was happening in real time! It was this system that enabled me to delve so deeply into what we could hear and why, exploit that knowledge and realise the applications for the OXF-R3 console and subsequently the Sony Oxford plug-ins. Quite simply, I was able to ‘play around’ with all sorts of  wacky processing models to get the behaviour that matched the all-important sounds in my head.”

This freedom of experimentation allowed Paul to move from traditional audio utilities like EQ’s and Dynamics processors into more creative arenas.  “The Transmod was something that I have always wanted since the mid 1970s and over the decades had tried on several occasions to make such a thing out of analogue technology. But it was doomed to failure because of the relatively poor accuracy and stability of real components. During a lunchtime, I knocked up a digital version of my old idea as proof of concept, and it just worked!

“The Inflator came about because I received a late night call from a friend who had been doing high profile sessions in L.A.with Clapton and BB King. He had slogged away for months doing recordings and mixes, but had been beaten into production by another engineer who had managed to make it louder than he could by using an OXF-R3. He wanted to know if there was anything he could possibly do to make it louder without wrecking the sound completely. On both counts I had to say that I didn’t think so, but after some pacing around, I was reminded that I had to make my first transistor power amp design in 1970 twice as powerful as the previous tube amp design to get the same volume and impact, at which point my speakers got burned. All I had to do was to apply all this old knowledge into a digital process and the same effect would be available. I used a combination of math packages (mostly on a Palm organiser) and the OX-R3 design system to experiment and extract the salient details of what made the tube amp louder. This was definitely a walk on the wild side, since for the first time in this employment I was making something whose sole purpose was to generate a heap of distortion!”

After leaving Sony Oxford Paul set out on his own to begin further exploring the creative possibilities opening up through digital audio.  “The Pro Audio DSP initiative was conceived as a way of getting this stuff done without too much interference from marketing executives and sales infrastructures.”  The first product is the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper plugin.  “This was yet another object I had always wanted to have since my engineering days. But the idea was given greater urgency from listening to what people were trying to achieve currently in their productions using greater amounts of compression, the kinds of character they were trying to produce and the difficulties they were battling with along the way. This, and a deep personal dislike for the artefacts produced in conventional multi-band designs, gave impetus for the design of the DSM. Digital processing seemed to provide the possibility of actually making it at last.

“I am particularly pleased with the DSM because it’s exactly the sort of thing I want to bring to the market place – serious processes that have groundbreaking practical purpose and facility, which are at the same time artistically capable and great fun! Such things really excite me because they bring genuinely new capabilities and artistic power to the production process.”  Emphasis on ‘genuinely new’ as Paul is quick to point out, “DSM is not a convolution processes!!”  Convolution and emulation are sensitive subjects for Paul as often it is his handiwork that is subject to emulation.  “To be honest it does make me feel uneasy on many levels. And of course for me there’s deep irony in the concept on both sides of the fence, because I did design some of the ‘celebrated things’ from the analogue days that people claim to have cloned. So I do know if the claims people are making for their clones actually hold any water in reality.

“From my perspective as a designer, the ‘magic’ that people like to attribute to my old designs does not exist in the least. All we were struggling to do with analogue designs back then was to obtain the level of signal path quality, application capability and precision we are actually making right now! The EQ and Dynamics I made for the OXF-R3 console, were what I would have made for the SSL console, if it had been possible. Apart from all the issues about whether these clones are ‘real’ or just marketing tools, and the whole discussion about the ethics of blindly copying things one does not truly understand and offering a ‘dream’ to people desperate for a piece of the old action at a fraction of the cost; what worries me most is that people supporting all this are not actually advancing our art.”

The weight of this cannot be underestimated, particularly while looking at the breath of Paul’s career.  If there is a theme to be found throughout it is a continuous effort to push forward the technology as art.  “I don’t want to waste the rich experience of the past in some manic push for ‘newness’. Neither do I want to simply try and blindly copy what was there, in the hope that it does the same ‘kind of thing’. I want to understand it and use that understanding to produce new stuff, which is truly creative and actually advances our art. We should be carrying the past forward with us in a continuous process of advancement, not writing it off to history, or reverting to it in a religious search for past success.”

You May Want To Read:

• Coming of Digital Age: Paul Frindle Part I
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