Andy Bereza - Creator Of The Portastudio

Paul Gilby Welcome to the Sound On Sound recording and mixing podcast channel. My name is Paul Gilby. Today I'm speaking to Andy Bereza, someone whose name may not be familiar to many listeners, but is in fact the man who founded the British company Allen & Heath Mixers, where he designed Pink Floyd's live quadraphonic desk and afterwards went on to invent one of the milestone products in the history of the audio industry, namely the Teac Portastudio, the cassette based four track that kick started the global home studio recording market. So, welcome to the Sound Sound podcast, Andy. Andy Bereza Hi there. Paul Gilby You started to study electronics at Chelsea University, you'd moved to London and what happened? Andy Bereza Well, I was passionate from even earlier than that about doing things with sound recording. I got a tape recorder when I became a teenager and that started me off. I ended up building simple mixers, simple reverbs. By the time I got to university, I thought they'd teach me all about electronics very quickly, it wasn't going to happen. So I took the initiative of wandering around Tin Pan Alley as it was at the time in Denmark Street and bumped into somebody, a record producer, who happened to be of Polish origin like myself, so that was a good starting point, who I overheard him say to a chap called Ted Fletcher, who was then Alice Mixers and famous for Joe Meek compressors later on, he asked him about making him a mixer and I kind of hijacked Ziggy when he left the studio and said, I'll build you a mixer and that was my start in making recording mixers. Paul Gilby And from there, you kind of established a sort of a pseudo company. Andy Bereza Yes, so the first leaf, Ziggy's friend was a guy called Bill Shepherd, who was a producer of the Bee Gees at that time and he saw Ziggy's mixer and he said, I'd love to have one for doing sound on sound recording on a Revox, the size of a Revox. I said yes, that's possible, so I built one in my garage to fit that and then from that cascaded the fact that Maurice Gibb wanted one, then I did an ad, I built an oddball mixer for recording some film soundtracks, then a chap called John Jordan came along who was about to do Clockwork Orange and for whatever reason and a lot of serendipity, I ended up with building a batch of six mixers, another one for Alan Price and another one for Theatre Sound and Lighting, which was to do with a show in London for Burt Bacharach called Promises Promises. It was amazing. I left university and built my first batch of mixers in my dad's garage in Ealing. Paul Gilby So you built a mixer for use on Clockwork Orange film set? Andy Bereza Yeah. The dialogue on, which was a famous recordist, John Jordan, he wanted a mixer. What I was doing was providing the facilities, I realize it's very, very early on, in fact I remember visiting Rupert Neve, I wanted to provide facilities that up to that time had cost a lot of money, equalizers, faders and other enhancements to a simple mixer, which at that time was probably something like a Vortexion or something and make it look like a proper console and people caught on to this. Paul Gilby And in a very portable format, presumably. Andy Bereza In a very portable format, yeah. In fact, if you look at what came in as the black range, which was the first range of Allen & Heath mixers, they very much copied what Neve was doing, you know, there was a channel strip held in a chassis, in fact they used the same ISEP system as they did. But I just simplified it by bending a piece of metal, not encasing the module in metal, simplifying it but still giving it the functionality of a console. Paul Gilby So you just mentioned Allen & Heath there, for the benefit of the listeners, we just better wind back a little bit and you tell us about Allen & Heath because you are the founder. Andy Bereza Indeed. At, one of those mixers, the one I sent for the Theatre Sound and Lighting which was, I think, the Victoria Theatre, or somewhere like that. Jim Douglas had a great friend called Stephen Batiste, who was I think, an art director or something at that time. He introduced me to him, and his father had an engineering company called Allen & Heath that had gone bankrupt. In that combination, Steve, his father wanted him to get involved in some kind of business, got me to meet him and there was a shell company that I could go into. Let me just slightly just backtrack on that, somebody had said to me earlier, what you want to do is to find yourself a millionaire to back you with these ideas and so, you know, the feelers were out to do this and therefore, I fell into that one. I say fell into that one because that's another story. Paul Gilby So Allen & Heath was established as a mixing company with you as the main person. Andy Bereza Originally, Allen & Heath were engineers, they ended up doing hairdryers later on. But the name came across. It was a tax loss company, therefore there was a shell to go into. I started out with a couple of employees. Very quickly the mixer that I'd built for a chap called Ian Leake, who was of the Alan Price set, he introduced me to Bob Pridden of The Who, who was a friend of his and that turned into Bob Pridden saying, could you build a quadraphonic mixer because we have to take Tommy out on the road. And in my hutzpah sense at that time I said, you mean with four outputs switchable? And he said yes and that's how the first mixer for The Who was built. Paul Gilby So that was happening in parallel to the Minimix? Andy Bereza The Minimix came along a little bit later. The Black Range was the fundamental construct. My thinking was, the Minimix came along a little bit later, in finding a way of making mixing consoles for even less money. Because you then went, well, this is a metal panel with knobs attached to it, with panels, printed circuit boards plug into sockets. All of this costs money. The Minimixer came out of another, in those days, chat in a pub with, I think Bob Woolford was his name,and he said to me, I bet you couldn't build a mixer into a cigar box and I said well, sounds good, let's try that and that's how the Minimixer came about. A lot of innovation in that, in my view, in that it was double sided printed circuit board, which I remember laying out double full size with lots of sticky tape. Volume controls which were mounted on the board, which was almost impossible at that time because they weren't around, so I used television presets from inside TV sets. Faders had just come out from roof, which is the most expensive part of the mixer. Phono sockets mounted on the board. So in fact, it was just literally a printed circuit board, nine inches square, double side with all the components, everything mounted on. It was a six by two mixer. So that got the thinking going, how do you construct lots of facility for very little money. Paul Gilby So Allen & Heath were building bespoke mixers before, he did the one for The Who and they were just one off mixers, not production mixers. They were commissioned to order, as it were. Andy Bereza Yes, but they were commissioned from a series of modules, which is what made them possible. So the modules that you see inside the Pink Floyd mixer, the input modules, we were by this time running in the hundreds. We changed the chassis, some had two outputs, some had 10 inputs, we had different size boxes we could stick these in, so we were facilitating lots of different places. I built them for radio studios, for discos, for bands, it was a whole range. The mixer market then was very small, so you had to bend to everybody's requirement. There were no two mixers the same at the time. Paul Gilby Yeah, everything was bespoke. So the Minimix became the first, as it were, production line mixer that everybody bought in exactly the same format. Andy Bereza Indeed. Paul Gilby And that was selling for what sort of money back then? Andy Bereza I think we were trying, I think it was around about a hundred pounds, we were trying to come with it within that price bracket. Paul Gilby What sort of time, when's that, 71, 72? Andy Bereza Yes, about 72 I'd say. Paul Gilby You mentioned Pink Floyd then. That's a magic name of a band in many people's reckoning and it has become known that you were the creator of the Pink Floyd Quadraphonic Desk, which was used at Pompeii and a second one that was built for the Dark Side of the Moon tour. So, just going back to the first quad desk which you built for The Who, that effectively was just routing four to four channels, presumably. The Floyd desk was the first one to use pan pots to actually move the sound around the auditorium? Andy Bereza That's right, because that contact as I recall, going back whatever it is, 50, 40, 50 years, was by Bob Pridden introducing me to Peter Watts of the Pink Floyd, because they obviously had a greater interest in quadraphonics at that time. They had their, what was it called, the sonic co-ordinator or whatever it was... Paul Gilby Oh the Azimuth Co-ordinator Andy Bereza That's it, the Azimuth Co-ordinator. So they had already gone down the next route, I think that was handmade controller which, what they did then at that time as I understand it was fed that through a completely separate system so you could feed a signal into that pan pot or co-ordinator and feed it out to four separate amplifiers. It wasn't part of any mixing bus system. So by the time we got around to building the mixer, the call came out to incorporate lots of sub-routing, more effects channels and the ability to send any channel to a quadraphonic pan pot, which would then go out to the main sound system. Paul Gilby So that was seen in use in the Pompeii film, so that was kind of the Mark I version of that. Andy Bereza Yeah and I think, from what my records show or what we've talked about, I think they carried on using that mixer for a good three years from that time onwards. If you start out with that concert, it was there still 75, yeah. Paul Gilby And then the change with the Dark Side of the Moon mixer was just rebuilding a similar thing, but slightly different configuration? Andy Bereza Different routing, different faders, different lighting. There was some strange innovation in that one where we had this backlit panel that had the metering on which never, I mean, for example, that never really worked properly, because as soon as you took the mixer into daylight, you couldn't see what was going on, so meters at that point better. There were parametric equalizers on each channel. There were a number of different changes. It was more robust in the way it was constructed, by that time we'd made everything based on a one inch steel frame. So there were changes in it. Paul Gilby Yeah and you sometimes went to the concerts or you were on tour at hand to support? Andy Bereza Indeed. It was quite the thing really because having built the mixer and them taking it out on tour, I threw out the question saying look, if you're in America or in Japan and this mixer goes wrong halfway through the concert, what are you going to do? And they sort of huddled around and talked about and said well, would you come with us? So yes, I was part of the road crew for a, for quite a while and attended a lot of concerts and obviously saw what, how people were using it and what changes we could incorporate into future modifications. Paul Gilby So Allen & Heath, how was it evolving at that point then, in terms of the products that you were creating? Andy Bereza By this time we'd got some other ranges in, towards the end of that. We'd created what was called the Mod 2, which was definitely designed for 8 track work and that was again, physically quite clever. The sockets were on the modules and that was easy to construct and we were starting to ship those out to America at that time. There were lots more Minimixers, we had a second version mixer which was much more robust. We had a thing called a Quasi Mixer, which was a non-modular mixer, very slim, also used by bands and theaters. And we then developed yet another mixer called a Pop Mixer. So there's a lot of versions of mixers that fitted different little market slots. Paul Gilby So obviously the company was growing at that point and a couple of other people joined the business over those years who would become your partners in the future. So Andrew Sterling joined first and then Ivor Taylor, I believe. Andy Bereza Yeah, very close to each other at the time of realizing that just me on my own and a couple of engineers were not going to move this forward, so Andrew came in as a salesman. I remember him turning up with, on a sunny day with, in white shoes and an umbrella and a purple suit and that definitely felt like somebody to employ. Ivor I met simply because we had the same cars. He had recently burnt out the engine in his and it caught fire and we met practically by accident. He happened to be working for a chap called Peppy Rush in town and he came over and joined me. So yes, that was very fortunate to have a great salesman and a great engineer join early on. Paul Gilby Right, so Andrew was effectively getting out there and selling the products to distributors and direct commissions perhaps, was he? Andy Bereza Mainly direct at that time, going out to distributors. It was too early days that we're only turning over a few hundred thousand pounds at that time. So you know, selling abroad wasn't quite the thing. We got picked up by an American company called Audio Techniques. This is the problem you see. In England, if we were making a batch of 10 or 20 mixers in one hit for a market of 50 million people, if you looked at America, which was five times the population, somebody would be making a batch of a hundred or so. So the cost, the whole proportions were different, so obviously as soon as the Americans said, oh my God, you can make these little mixers for this kind of money, we ramped up what we were doing. Europe figured a little bit but it was really America that enabled us to produce more and more consoles. Paul Gilby So as Allen & Heath continued then, you got to a point where you felt that it was time to move on. How did it come to an end then, your involvement there? Andy Bereza Well, I had previously been approached a number of times at APRSs and other shows, AES in America by Yoshiharu Abe, who's the head of Tascam and he recognized that my take on, or our take on building mixers and recording equipment was aligned with theirs in trying to do it less expensively, but there was a bit more innovation in what we were doing in terms of our mechanical construction. So he invited me and I felt that this was the time to move on, that being with Allen & Heath would hold back what I was capable of doing and I joined TASCAM. I first joined TASCAM working for the TEAC Corporation of America, TCA, who were obviously speaking to me about new products and where they were going, but also gave me the responsibility of introducing TASCAM into Europe. So at that time we had the 88 recorder, we had a Model 5 mixer and I was charged with wandering around Europe and talking to various TEAC distributors who were in place and promoting the idea of multitrack. Paul Gilby So this is 1976 that this happened? Andy Bereza Yeah. Paul Gilby And then the Portastudio story. I mean, this is quite an amazing story and was really quite pivotal in creating, perhaps, the home studio recording market. Your involvement with that was absolutely crucial, I understand. Andy Bereza What I was always wanting to do was to create affordable recording equipment and the 3340, which was the most powerful piece of equipment for musicians at that time, was just too expensive. Huge box, nab reels, lots and lots of electronics inside, it was too expensive for most musicians. I had the concept that because cassettes had four tracks on them, why not try to build a cassette recorder with multi-track cell sync facilities. At first people objected to this whole idea in saying well, the low quality, it'll never be acceptable and I still felt that, well, it's a musical notepad, it doesn't have to do masters, but it does put the power of multitrack into the hands of musicians. It was an uphill climb for a long time. Philips objected to this because their cassette system is based on two stereo tracks in one direction and then two in the other direction. So four simultaneously would not be permitted. The first proposals for the Portastudio were based on an L cassette, which was then a transport, because I was simply trying to show that one box that did everything with a simple cassette mechanism, musicians would want. That started to get across and by this time Yoshiharu Abe, who was well into magnetic recording, I mean, they say he's a father of magnetic recording in Japan, discovered that actually Philips did allow four tracks in the same direction for industrial or professional applications like data recording, at which point I said, well, let's go a little bit further, let's double the speed of the cassette to three and three quarters. We're going to give us increased frequency response and that proposal got through, so they built a prototype, and we were ready to go with it. Paul Gilby So on the Philips compact cassette then we're talking about an eighth inch tape, which is about just over three millimeters in width and on that you've got four tracks for a music cassette, two in one direction and you turn the tape over and two in the other direction. Andy Bereza Well in my naive world, before I knew much about tape heads, what I realized was that in auto reverse car players you would not turn the cassette over. They would get to the end of the track and then reverse the motor and the tape would play in the opposite direction. In order to facilitate that, they had to develop a head which was four coils and four magnets in a single head. This was me trying to find an inexpensive way of doing it. The most expensive bit of a of a multitrack recorder is typically well, motors, but it's the head construction. So to build this tiny little head for a highly specialist market, like a few hundred or a few thousand Portastudios was not going to be possible. However, these heads were already being mass made in order to create auto reverse car players. So I realized that those heads were available and the mechanisms didn't cost a lot of money. What they had to do in the end was to create a four track erase head, which was never really required previously, because on a cassette player you simply have one erase head, which when you flip over, this had to have four separate erase heads on, which they developed and apparently they hired women from the jewellery industry in order to wind these tiny little coils to make the heads. Paul Gilby Wow, quite an amazing technical achievement then at the time. Andy Bereza Yeah, the rest of the electronics came from the fact that they had been, you know, all the knowledge they had from building the 3340 and 4 track on quarter inch tape, so down to eighth inch tape, there were a few extra complications. So they had to introduce noise reduction, Dolby B and to make it as silent as possible and of course increased speed, increased the quality, so it was very well accepted in the marketplace. Paul Gilby Yeah, so that really created the bedroom musician explosion where people could record on a fairly cheap device and get their songs down and as you were saying, it's like a musical notepad and inspired a huge amount of creativity. And there are many famous stories of course, of Bruce Springsteen being perhaps the main one, of people who were recording on Portastudios at that time. And bringing that price bracket down from serious home recording, which was possible on say, a TEAC 3340 to a compact cassette format and that just seemed to take off and all of a sudden there was a home studio recording market. But you left TEAC quite soon afterwards. Andy Bereza Yes I did and it was for financial reasons, because TEAC had employed me on a commission basis and I think they ended up saying, if we start paying you commission on these Portastudios, we'll end up paying you what we can pay 10 engineers in Japan. So I was thrown out, basically. Paul Gilby So you'd invented a product that was too successful and you paid the price. Andy Bereza Yeah, my arrangement was as European co-ordinator for sales and I don't think they realized how big the market would become and promises about me doing product development turned sour in the end. Paul Gilby Right. So you then left and quite soon joined forces with the establishment of Fostex. Andy Bereza In between times we had got back together again with Andrew and Ivor. They'd left Allen & Heath for similar reasons as I had left and we started up Bandive Limited in London, which then went on to create Turnkey, Seck Mixers, Great British Spring and various other things, so we started up a manufacturing and retail outlet. In the meantime for the same reasons as I had left TEAC, Yoshiharu Abe and his whole team, Miki Matsumoto and others, also left TASCAM, simply because of disagreements with management and they then ended up at Foster, as another financier man called Shinohara who employed them to start up Fostex and because we'd become such close friends during the TASCAM years, I was pulled in as a consultant for Fostex in order to prepare for the launch of their product range in 1980. Paul Gilby But you're doing this in parallel to being involved in Turnkey and Bandive. Andy Bereza Indeed, yeah. Paul Gilby So at that time then, Turnkey established a retailer, you were doing a lot of mail order catalogue sales into what effectively really was a way of creating the British home studio recording market. Turnkey were very instrumental in championing that by having products that home recording musicians could purchase. But you also had the Bandive range and Accessit range of products that service that market because if you wanted a compressor or a reverb or something of that nature the only options were really professional units at the time which were far too expensive and really located in recording studios not in a home marketplace, but you launched products to service that market tell us a little bit more about those sorts of products and the rationale behind them. Andy Bereza So Andrew was the salesman, so he was the retailer, we started out at the bottom end of the market, but ended up selling Atari's, Soundcraft's and high end studios at Turnkey and Ivor and myself took part in creating ancilliary units. There was no point in trying to compete with multitrack recorders, because they were being made in Japan at a price that nobody could ever reach and the same end with many consoles. So we ended up, I think first, one of the first things we made was a thing called a Pro Kit, which was a six by two in kit form that was booster cell and assemble. Then we decided to build some accessories for which were compressors, equalizers and noise gates for the home market, which are all priced in the sort of 20, 30 pound region. We were able to do those again with clever manufacturing techniques of very small parts count. And then I think our greatest success was actually a thing called the Great British Spring. I don't know if you remember that. Ah, yes. Andy Bereza The Great British Spring actually contained two Hammond Springs, which were brilliantly made in America for Hammond organs and sounded brilliant. However, when we came around to packaging this product, again trying to get this down to a good price, we couldn't quite work out how to make a rackmount for it and so forth and one of us came up with the idea that actually, the Hammond spring chassis fits perfectly inside a piece of drain pipe tube and if you stuff two of them in, it looks like it's nearly five foot tall and you stick a bit of electronics at the end of it. But the piece of packaging was so unique, I think most people believed that there were huge long springs inside there, whereas actually there were just two ordinary Hammond springs with a very clever driver circuit. I must admit, I mean, we used to sell them I think, for under 200 pounds and we used to give out demo tapes of what they sounded like and it was an incredible sounding unit, I think. I still see them occasionally on eBay changing hands for nearly a thousand pounds each. Paul Gilby Incredible. Well, it's such an interesting vintage gear isn't it? And I believe you can also get a plug-in now that emulates The Great British Spring. Andy Bereza How cool is that? Absolutely brilliant. When the Fostex range was released, because we'd established ourselves in the UK, we then became the Fostex distributors in the UK and the relationship continued. So we had Turnkey, who was the biggest, probably the biggest retailer of TEAC and TASCAM in the UK and we were also the Fostex distributor, which was quite an uncanny thing to achieve at that time. Paul Gilby Yeah, to have two competing brands and being responsible for pushing them into the marketplace. I mean at that time, you talk about 1981 or so, you know, the Fostex A8, first eight track on quarter inch was released and that became a big hit. But 1983, we saw the introduction of the most iconic home recording tape recorder, which was of course the Fostex B16. Andy Bereza Well there were two things, the B16 and the X15. I mean, the X15 was an attempt again, to drive down the price and the whole idea, well, why does it have to be mains powered? Why does it have to have so many inputs? If you want a notepad, you can make this the size of a little plastic tape recorder and that really brought the price down. At the other end, yes, the B16 was introduced. Remember the engineers behind the B16 and the 8 track were the same engineers who had engineered the 3340 and the 88 at the very beginning. So that team led by Yoshiharu Abe and Miki Matsumoto and Yuki Ikeda were the people responsible really for the introduction of musicians multitrack. Paul Gilby Yeah so very much, you know, built on the legacy of their experience and launching a 16 track on half inch tape, which my recollections at the time were that, you know, it just boomed. All musicians who had enough money would buy that and it was often sold as a combination with an Allen & Heath system eight mixing desk. Andy Bereza Yes, it was. Yeah. All sorts of, all sorts of variations of that happened. Yeah. But, but, but mixers are not difficult to make. Tape recorders are incredibly difficult and we don't have to make them anymore anyway, do we? Paul Gilby No, no but the other thing that Bandive and Turnkey were famous for, of course, was the Seck range of mixers and that seemed to build very much on your Allen & Heath experience. Andy Bereza Yes I mean, that was again, Pro Kit was the first one, it was a very flat, single channel thing and then we ended up making a ready-assembled version with four outputs, so it matched perfectly with the four track studios at the time, 3340s. And then as time went on, Ivor developed the Seck range again, very slim but with very clever double sided engineering, enabling us to build PA mixers and recording mixers again in an aluminum chassis at an incredible price. Paul Gilby Certainly for the 8 track, 16 track market these, the Seck 1882, you know, gave you those eight outputs to record and it was such a slim mixer and all surface mounted on one circuit board, presumably harking back to your Mini Mix days, in a way. Andy Bereza Indeed, yeah, it was like, yeah, a massive, uh, mini mixer, very smartly engineered. I mean, there are, I mean, there are obviously problems when you put everything on one single board like that in terms of QC and so forth, but it works extremely well. Paul Gilby So Andy, you were also very much the driving force behind the marketing side of Turnkey, so give us a little bit more of detail in that area. Andy Bereza With the talents between Ivor's engineering talents, Andrew's sales talents and my dubious ones, I think that the next stage for me was to do everything we could to have as great a presence as we could in the home recording market. So this was driven by a number of things. One of the things we did very early on was to create a catalogue, which ended up as Turnkey by Mail, which was a highly informative, 48 page I think in its final version, booklet explaining everything you needed to have to make a studio work. We also expanded this out by having a thing called the Hands On Show, which was an exhibition, what annually, where people could actually come in and try the equipment. And then we had very challenging advertising for musicians and lots of different promotions, that also ended up with us having a retail store, Andrew pushed this. So we actually had a retail store in Denmark Street right in the center. So it was different from other music sales places that also had recording equipment, we exclusively sold recording equipment to musicians. Paul Gilby I remember going into that store, I mean, the actual store design, the layout of it seemed very innovative at the time. It was a space unlike other music stores that you'd ever been into. Almost like there were separate workstations where you could demonstrate cassette Portastudios or Reel to Reels or listen to monitors or look at different mixing desks, I seem to remember. Andy Bereza Yeah, indeed. It was a designer called Robin Derrick who took everything on board in terms of what we wanted to achieve in the space and it was a bit crazy the amount of money I think we spent in developing both that and then later the Percy Street shop. But anybody going in there had a place to turn to for the information and the demos they needed. So yes that was very, very successful for us. Paul Gilby And I mean in America, obviously the home studio market similarly boomed with the introduction of TEAC and Fostex and you had retailers such as Guitar Center, Sam Ash, Sweetwater doing mail order and West LA Music. But they were different in a sense, weren't they, because they were selling musical instruments as well, not just recording. Andy Bereza That's right. There were enough people selling musical instruments up and down the country, we just want to be the specialists in recording equipment and that worked extremely well for us. Paul Gilby So that was going well and then you got to a point in time where you decided there was an opportunity to move out and sell to Harman? Andy Bereza The opportunity arose in a strange way really. We'd had differences between the three partners. We weren't partners, we were directors in the same company. Andrew Stirling left the company, so we lost the lead salesman and we felt that we needed to refinance our business because with Andrew left some of our prime business with Atari and we reached out to find some external financing and sales support and this is how we came across the fact that Harman were looking at that point to acquire professional audio companies well-established in the marketplace. They were also looking for products to manufacture in this area, which of course Seck was being very successful at the time and the relationship was established. Paul Gilby And what was your role then within Harman? Andy Bereza We were acquired by Harman UK and I became a director of Harman UK Marketing in which involved hi-fi as well. It wasn't particularly my range of interest because there were other areas to be responsible for. At this point also Harman decided to buy up Soundcraft and that overshadowed our activities with Seck. So, to many ways, both Ivor and myself, who had come along when our company was bought, that became quite a difficult situation. So we decided after a couple of years that we would resign and go our own way. Paul Gilby So did that bring to an end your sort of involvement in the audio industry at that time then? Andy Bereza No not really. I was there for another couple of years because I carried on consulting for Fostex. Fostex had by this time set up their own distribution in the UK which was under problematic management and I took over as managing director for a while. I then handed that role to Ivor who stayed there and a bit later on, in trying to address the future issues of Fostex, again I lost my job with a Japanese company. And it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't much longer after that that the founders, Abe and Matsumoto and some of the other engineers also left because of disagreements with the management of Fostex in Japan. So I was quite happy at that point, they went into retirement and I went off to do multimedia. So, that kind of tied up my career in audio. Paul Gilby Another business cycle comes to an end. Andy Bereza Indeed. Paul Gilby So multimedia, we're talking here about the early 90s, 92 to 94 maybe, when things were CD-ROM based and I remember meeting with you at that time and you were very excited about it. I think we bumped into each other at some sort of multimedia show in London and you were telling me you were involved or started a business to get involved in doing things like that. So, what are the details behind that? Andy Bereza As I was getting more into marketing, product design was always advice and direction for Fostex and Tascam and with Ivor on Seck. I was more interested in marketing and realized that things happening on a screen were coming around in a big way. It wasn't just looking at mail and letters, it was actually pre-internet to be perfectly honest and I realized that you could put catalogues on screen, you could put encyclopedias on screen and this whole world of creating interactive functionality for customers was the new way to reach the market. So I started up a company called Digital Postcards, which Basically created entire programs with their engines on a 1.4MB floppy disk and that graduated to CD-ROMs after a time. Andy Bereza Did that company last up to the internet age? Yes, it did. Yes, it did. I then got, I learned how to program quite well in the engines we were using for CD-ROMs. But when the internet came along, there were just so many other people half my age doing that so much better, that I felt that I would just concentrate in a small way on it and not try to establish it. The market became too big at that point. Paul Gilby So what was the end then, to all of this interest? Andy Bereza Well, I carried on until the end of the last century, continuing with lots and lots of multimedia productions and CD-ROMs. I had a dozen people working for me at one point. Eventually it petered out and I applied my innovative interests to construct buildings. Paul Gilby Perhaps it's worth taking a moment to let you kind of summarize, in a way, your career or the passion that drove you through all of that. Andy Bereza When I started recording 60 years ago, I was always looking to create something like what I'd been hearing on the radio or in music and I just got totally involved in the technology. Mixers were the first place to go and fortunately in my career I met musicians who wanted the equipment built and engineers who wanted the equipment built. I was encouraged constantly to create more interesting equipment. When multitrack became possible, mainly due to this TEAC 3340, I could see the potential in providing and facilitating every musician to have home recording equipment and just pursued that relentlessly. Great career. Paul Gilby Yeah and obviously you've been responsible for some quite sort of milestone products. If you had to single one out, which is, are you most proud of? Andy Bereza The Portastudio. That just brought everything down to the correct level. Paul Gilby And inspired a whole new generation of musicians, bedroom musicians. Andy Bereza Indeed. It just enabled musicians to record before the onset of being able to do it on your phone. Paul Gilby Great. Thanks for the interview Andy. Great to talk to you and good luck with your future building projects. Andy Bereza Thanks so much, great talking to you too. Paul Gilby Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all our other episodes. Oh and before you go, let me point you to soundonsound.com/podcasts, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels. This has been a Paul Gilby production for Sound On Sound Magazine.