SOUND TRAVELS
Alistair is a hands-on innovator. He builds his own hi-fi equipment: from the phono stages to the pre and power amplifiers to the loudspeakers. That’s not uncommon, every audiophile knows a hobbyist, some bloke working in a back shed with a soldering iron, a hacksaw and a vision. But few hobbyists travel overseas to learn their craft and even fewer have worked in responsible engineering positions at the British Broadcasting Corporation. Alistair has. A physicist by training, then a professional engineer who, now that he’s back home in Melbourne, enjoys freely teaching others the craft of high-end audio in his spare time.
“A key thing I’ve learnt in my work,” he says somewhat modestly, “is that design is not so much about the quality of the components: it’s about the quality of the implementation, it’s about the wiring detail of the circuit board. Not just the schematic and how the components are connected together — it’s about innovation, using new ideas to solve old problems. Ultimately a good design will provide a clean signal from the outset and eliminate subtle distortions, those aural effects that we hear subliminally.”
Alistair’s designs are the result of years of trial and error. A bit like Newton’s “standing on the shoulders of giants,” he says with a chuckle. He spent years learning to avoid messy circuitry, the spider labyrinths that can attract all kinds of sonic interference, and common in complex circuits. Sitting back in his comfortable inner-urban home, he offers a memorable example. “One time at the BBC, we couldn’t get the hum out of a recording console; we tried everything — isolation transformers, you name it, we even moved the equipment about, end to end. Eventually we looked at the building plans and we found a huge transformer on the floor directly below the unit! You can guess what became of that.” As a New Zealand engineer, you couldn’t afford to embarrass the Queen and her subjects with hum in their television sets. “Believe me,” he says, “those glitches made me jittery about live broadcasts.”
Alistair graduated from Auckland University in Science with a major in
semiconductor engineering, and then moved to the UK where he parlayed his talent to good effect. He handled “the finest audio equipment” as a young man and had acquired the skills to build excellent audio equipment “at less than a fraction of the price”, so he says, because of expertise acquired at the BBC.
Alistair “bagged a job”, he says, with the BBC world service in 1995 after working as a voluntary audio technician at the student radio station, 95 BMF at Auckland University. His gilded application landed him a plum novice job with what he calls “the technically challenged BBC World Service” saying that the organization was BBC One’s poor cousin, and was in desperate need of updated technology: “They even asked if I could align reel-to-reel tape recorders which, of course, I could. The job meant I could communicate with people all around the world. People such as that legend of music, John Peel, and others. I met a lot of interesting personalities.”
Meanwhile he learned about the vagaries of sound, how to optimize top-end equipment such as LS3/5as, LS5/8s, and Nagra portable field recorders. He grew up with fine audio. His parents in New Zealand had a Rega turntable and KEF speakers, a modest but nice sound, though nothing like the supernova of sound he heard at the BBC. “There I was servicing this cuttingedge equipment of the time, like a kid in a lolly shop.” It sparked a lifetime passion for good quality sound, in studios without resonances, where the recording sounded like the artist was in the room and, he says, “you felt engaged with the artist.”
A few years later he sent an updated application, with his new credentials, to Anglia Television in Norwich and was hired as a Broadcast Engineer. “I started mostly installing and commissioning new equipment while working directly under the chief engineer who designed the multimillion pound investments using the latest Canon, Sony, and Panasonic innovations. It was big-budget stuff. I remember driving four professional video machines in the back of my car, worth the cost of a small house, some £100,000 in those days.”
“In my flat in the late ‘90s, I had a reasonable Cambridge audio amplifier, an Arcam CD player and I built a pair of kit-set speakers. That’s where I first acquired the satisfaction of building my own equipment. My trained ears told me that what I had built was worth three times the price, given my background in pricing electronics.”
PX: You eventually returned with your ex-wife and child to Australia.
Alistair: Yes, you couldn’t raise a child in a flat, away from family, and enjoy the remarkable music scene in England. We could no longer go out any night of the week as a couple to enjoy blues, reggae and world music events.
PX: I assume the shift from analog to digital in the late 90s affected your job prospects on returning to Australia?
Alistair: I saw my original skill set go obsolete. So I took a step backwards and to the side. Luckily in the UK I had done some electronics work while working in television — such as creating custom units to handle the introduction of wide-screen broadcasts. In effect, I was re-skilling from electronics engineering to systems engineering. By doing this, I was able to obtain other roles designing equipment rather than servicing and installing it.
PX: Given that new-found knowledge, tell us about your own choice of audio components?
Alistair: I chose the Oppo 105 Blu-ray player because it’s so versatile. It’s not only a Blu-ray player but also a media centre;
I can screen video to the projector and to the television; it has a decent CD player and has inputs for an external hard drive. I have ripped all my CDs to the hard drive, but I’ve kept them as well. I like hard copies.
PX: Can you describe your other equipment for us?
Alistair: I own an original Linn LP12 with a vintage Grado moving-iron cartridge on a Grace arm. The rest is my design: an op-ampbased pre-amp that I built that drives a ClassD class power amp that I also built which uses a power IC from Texas Instruments. It’s rated at 150 watts per channel. I built it using the best engineering practices and to my ears it sounds neutral and balanced.
I also designed and built my own phono preamp. It has two inputs — one for moving-magnet which has 45dB of gain and uses a JFET, and one for moving-coil with 65dB of gain that uses a pair of ultralow-noise bipolar transistors. I believe you can’t get the optimum performance if MM and MC share the same input. Then there are the RIAA equalization and line output stages. The first stage of amplification is critical. You can’t get rid of noise down the line. The power supply is in a separate diecast metal box to reduce hum and noise.
PX: Your speakers certainly look impressive; standing sturdy on their metal stands!
Alistair: The speakers are styled on the retro Harbeth and ATC monitors. I always loved that English look. I’ve used a Raal ribbon tweeter (Serbian origin), and an AudioTechnology 5-inch midrange (Denmark). For the bass drivers I use custom-made 12inch models from John Janowitz of Acoustic Elegance in the USA. They are a sealed-box design for best transient response and produce bass down to 40Hz, clean and fast. With 91–92dBSPL efficiency, they’re not hard to drive. They sit in a 100-litre volume cabinet made out of bamboo plywood, with light polyester hollow fill packing inside.
PX: And your musical tastes?
Alistair: I love blues. I’ve been to the Byron Bay Blues Fest several times. There are so many great blues singers I enjoy — Junior Wells, John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray Vaughn. Tesky Brothers. A lot of Flying Nun label artists too.
PX: What way does music affect your life, your emotions and the way you feel?
Alistair: It’s an escape from daily life, it emotionally engages me and uplifts me — it’s the blues for me and pop for my feet.
PX: And can you tell us what you think the future of music might be?
Alistair: Streaming. That’s it. For the general public, it’s all about music on demand — a subscription will get them any music on Earth; just click and it’s available. The streaming providers data-mine your musical tastes to define your identity and then serve up music they think you will want to hear. But with a record, it’s tangible; it’s something you specifically bought for yourself from a bricks and mortar music store. It’s tangible and it’s yours.
Alistair takes pride in ownership and that’s why he uses his considerable experience to make things that are tangible and uniquely his. And they sound pretty damn good too.