In the 1930s, engineers at Bell Labs had a problem that had nothing to do with music. Long-distance telephone calls arrived thin and unnatural, stripped of the small delays and reflections a voice picks up in a real room. Their fix was mechanical: a spring stretched inside a housing, with a transducer at each end. […]
For most of recorded rock, amp tone was a one way door. You picked the cabinet, you placed the mic, you committed. If the mix later told you the guitar was too thin or too woolly, your options were to live with it or to book the band again. The device that quietly dismantled that […]
