Test Fitting A Dream, An Interview With Neil Gandler

The IntroductionOne day (within the first two weeks of working here) I got a phone call that was different from the type of calls that the editor of this magazine is likely to receive. I can't remember verbatim the conversation, but I do recall that this person was very enthusiastic about his product, and very persuasive with his opinions about the industry and how it was time for changes. I have met my fair share of engineers, but never one quite so vociferous, and even a bit cocky. He went so far as to say he wanted to drive down (approximately 600 miles) to show me what he is working on. A few days later Neil Gandler actually showed up to meet with me and my technical editor, Howie Liwanag. We listened to his ideas and discussed his product prototype. We went out to his car to demo his mad scientist contraption afterwards. That night I began to think of his ideas about the future of car audio. At the very least he had inspired a great deal of curiosity on our part, so we invited Neil to CES for an interview. More on that later. What follows serves as an introduction. I thought readers would like to know the background story. I'm always curious to know what really makes enthusiasts like him tick.

Neil Gandler's musical experiences while in college studying electrical engineering really began to develop. The first semester there his roommate had a major sound system and starting listening to groups like Rush and other major rock bands. What compelled Neil to get into the home audio gear itself was a neighbor in the dorm room who had this huge system that was constantly vibrating the walls. Neil wanted to come back the following year and blow this guy away. So coming back blasting his system in the dorm made for the next phase of experiences with audio electronics and music.

Neil's hands-on experience started much younger, when he was seven years old and playing with those little electronic experimentation kits. As he got older and honed his soldering technique he built a "boombox" out of wood. He cut out holes for speakers and made a "kit amp" on a circuit board, cutting out a slot that held a Walkman that was used as the source unit. No, Neil is not from the stone age, but he knew by the age of fourteen that he wanted to be an electrical engineer, so doing projects like this was normal. But what really got him into car audio was reading a lot of car magazines. Getting into cars and wanting to put a system together was the formula for his passion. He was helping a few of his friends put systems in their cars and started to see the huge vacuum in technology, along with the problems in car audio: still doing things with knobs, blowing up stiffening caps and amps due to improper installation, etc. Neil loved looking at his friends' situations and trying to find solutions. His mind was crammed with ideas! In 1991 while working on a friend's Jeep, he built a small enclosure to hold both a woofer and an integrated amp. In 1995, the year he was to graduate, another light bulb burned over his head. He looked back on his concept of the amplified woofer enclosure and built upon it with new ideas. Integration was key with such things as digital gain adjustment, digital tune filter, an anti-clipping system, and a stiffing capacitor port. Neil felt he was ahead of his time in 1995 with his first microprocessor-controlled amplifier. Maybe the industry's first? As for the academic result: he got an "A" on his project.