Conversation of Legends

Author Eric Holdaway with family Roger and Pat

Although Car Audio and Electronics is looking back at its first 15 years, this article looks back even further. Four of the original movers and shakers, true giants of the industry, were assembled and given the chance to espouse on the birth of mobile electronics. They are:

Paul Stary of Audiomobile (bought and sold many times and now gone); Rich Coe of Audiomobile, Alpine Electronics, and now Eclipse; Robert Zeff of Zeff Advanced Product Company (Zapco was purchased by ARPA); and Jim Fosgate of Fosgate Electronics (purchased by Rockford Corp).

Rich Coe

These four men share some surprising similarities, aside from birthing mobile electronics. All of them are within 10 years of the same age, with Jim Fosgate the oldest ("65 years young" as he said). None of them could recall dates of events, because the dates just aren't that important to them; the events were. All four of them are amplifier design guys, and not one of them graduated from college. Although Paul and Robert could have graduated with degrees, instead they chose to jump into their own 12-volt businesses. Rich got a trade school degree from the Cleveland Institute of Electronics, but interestingly the most influential of them all, Jim Fosgate, did not attend any college. All of them are self-made men in the classic American way.

Jim Fosgate

CA&E: Where did you come from and where did you get your direction?

Stary: I was born in California, but we moved around a lot. I went to high school in Levitown, PA, and attended Penn State. I never attended two grades in the same school until high school. I was an only child and I was able to be pretty self-contained and find projects to entertain myself. I credit a lot of my inventive nature to my dad, because he was an inventor. He would sit around and design stuff all the time. My ability to sink into a project and stick with it for years comes from my dad. Today that's become a lost art.

Paul Stary

Both my mother and father were driven, type-A personalities, always working out the details and doing the best at whatever they were working on and I'm the same way. I had a passion for sound by the time that Audiomobile started and I wanted audiophile results. I really credit Larry Fredricks and Richard Burtis with teaching me how to listen and hear sound. They took me from 60 to 95 in terms of my audiophile listening experience.

Robert Zeff

Zeff: I was born and raised in Modesto, CA. My father was a Naval warrant officer. I'm not quite sure what that means actually but he was into electronics. He serviced radios and transmitters and that peaked my interest when I was really, really young. I was into electronics from the very early days that I can remember, building things or taking things apart. Then I went to the local junior college and then to UC Berkeley. While attending Berkeley I was cherry picking the classes that I wanted and I was called into the Dean's office and he told me that I would have to take a lot of lower level classes that I had skipped over. They were perquisite for the higher-level classes that I had already taken and had gotten A's in, if I planed to graduate.

I went ahead and signed up for the classes that I needed to graduate, but I was already excited about the whole idea of doing something, actually getting my hands on it and creating something. So a friend of mine and I dropped out of Berkeley and we started Zeff Advanced Products Company (ZAPCO).

Coe: Mars. [laughs] I was born in San Diego, CA but I was an Air Force kid, so we traveled around a lot when I was little. I went through junior high and high school in Grants Pass, OR. In the early '70s I was playing in nightclubs, and on the road doing backups for concerts and stuff. I started repairing and building my own sound equipment. I was into improving the performance of the gear. It started me thinking in terms of systems and electronic crossovers because there was a lot of loss in the passives then. I started studying electronics as a backup; in other words, I told myself that if this doesn't work out, I'm not going to make a career of starvation. So I signed up for a Cleveland Institute of Electronics correspondence course, so that when I was on the road, I would be studying electronics.

Fosgate: I was born and raised in Indianapolis, IN, but I've been out west since 1964. I started out working with Father in his radio and TV repair shop. I was doing television calls when I was just a teenager. I'm what you call self-trained. My father taught me how to be an empirical designer and to figure things out myself. I just seemed to have a comprehension and understanding for it. I never did need to go to school for it, I was just born with it. I built lots of the Dynakits in the early golden days of hi-fi.

CA&E: What did you do wrong and what was your biggest disappointment?

Stary: I didn't recognize, in my youth, that it took a lot more to be successful in business than just a good product. Even today, I am learning those lessons. Marketing is probably the most important aspect of being successful in any business, way more important than any product.

There have been lots of disappointments, such as not getting my degree in college, but that never affected my career. I've been working for myself since I was 29. It's just a personal failure to not have finished what I started.

Zeff: I would like to say that what we did wrong was starting an association with Ford Motor Company. We went into HUGE debt over that, but on the other hand, if I had to rewrite it and say, do it all over again, I can't say that I would undo it. It was a great experience, and I met some great people that we learned a lot from.

Coe: I think one of the things that I did wrong was leaving Alpine. I left angrily when the distribution shifted. What I should have done was stay there and develop product that skewed to the channel instead of trying to skew the channel to the product.

One of the other things I did wrong was tinkering with technology rather than studying management. I probably could be making a lot more money right now if I'd have been more of a professional and less of a "crazy man" out back.

My biggest disappointment, I dare not say while you're recording. Because sure as hell, it will come out in, like, 24 font! Just bad decisions business wise, nothing product wise.

Fosgate: What I did do I felt pretty good about. What I wanted to do at the time was get into surround sound in cars but I was way ahead of myself. I did demos even while we still had the original Fosgate Audionics running with surround sound. We actually had it sounding pretty good, but the industry was not ready for that at all.

I left Fosgate at that time and kept dabbling with automotive surround sound and I never did quit. At that time there was no such thing as home theater or surround sound. We were working in the tail end of the quadraphonic era. And we had to get away from the stigmata of quadraphonic, so we thought of names and we coined the term "surround sound" and started to tie the audio and video together to create a "home theater."

CA&E: What's coming up next?

Zeff: I can't comment on that. Look for DVD-Audio.

Coe: A bunch. OEM will take ownership of a lot of what's going on. We're seeing a lot of transition towards software-configurable hardware. The future is going to be software driven. There will still be new advances in technology in loudspeaker designs.

There is going to be a huge transition in the business with the voltage change of vehicles. Eventually the mechanism will go away. Everything in the car will be solid state. All the memory, it's all going to go to digital format and video will have big transitions in the displays.

Fosgate: I do believe that surround sound will become a lot more popular in the automobile. To my way of thinking, it's the only way to generate a truly three-dimensional sound stage and to make a lot bigger sound stage in the car. What I've always wanted to hear in the car is something that sounds a whole lot bigger, where it has a lot more depth, space and air all around. The object of surround sound is to reproduce the environment of the original recording.

CA&E: Who are your heroes?

Stary: Intellectuals like my friends Dave Gore and Martin Willcocks. I credit them with teaching me most of what I know about electronics, loudspeakers, and crossover design. They are both really brilliant guys and Dave still provides inspiration and guidance for most of my projects.

Zeff: Albert Einstein, Nicola Tesla (although he was hard on animals so I can't elevate him to hero), the mathematician Richard Fineman, although, I can't say that I fully understand his works.

Coe: Shaq. He's made so much money he just turned into a cop at the Port of Entry as a hobby. My heroes are people that have made so much money that they continue working at what they want to do, just for the fun of it. In the audio industry there are thousands of heroes.

Fosgate: My heroes are probably the early vacuum tube designers like the guys at McIntosh, Dynakit and Marantz. Those are my heroes because I love what they were doing, I love where they were coming from. They were true artists. They were perfectionists. If you listen to the work they did, it was just magic, it really was.

CA&E: Best life advice?

Stary: The meaning of life is "in between." It's not the beginning or the goal that teaches, it's what you learn along the way. Enjoy the struggle -- it's the journey that counts.

Zeff: Life advice? Oh gosh. I don't know, my life's not over yet, so I can't answer that question.

Coe: Listen to others. Something I should have done more of myself.

Fosgate: There's one little verse that I have on top of my work bench: "Everything cometh to he that waiteth, as long as he worketh like hell while he waiteth."

In my own experience with surround sound, I had a fantasy in my mind of what I wanted it to sound like and I couldn't rest until I managed to get it to sound that way. I just couldn't leave it alone and I just couldn't stop. Just goes to show you that your dreams can come true if you keep working on it long enough and hard enough.

CA&E: Does that mean that you've reached your impression of what surround sound should be like with Pro-logic II?

Fosgate: Yes, I think I did. I wanted to do something that I could share with other audio people and humanity. That was why I wanted to get the technology licensed by Dolby so that it would be readily available at a reasonable price to the mainstream.

CA&E: What got you into car audio and when?

Paul Stary: A friend introduced me to electronics at the age of 11. He took me home to meet his brother, who was a ham radio operator, and I had never seen somebody sitting in front of a little box talking to a person halfway around the world. It just freaked me out. I went home and got a shortwave radio and strung a long wire antenna in the attic and started shortwave listening. That started my interest in electronics. At about 14 years old, I built my first Layfette kit with my father and was hooked. By the time I was 21, I had built over 100 electronics kits and dozens of speaker systems. I would build systems and sell them. I was a gear-head, too. I was totally into hi-fi and cars. In '60 or '61, I was building inverters out of the Radio Amateur's Handbook, using them to put my Dynaco Stereo 70's and Jansen Electrostat speakers in place of the backseat in my Plymouth Fury. The link between audio and cars was just so obvious to me, even back then.

In 1967, while I was attending Penn State, I hocked my car against my parent's admonition to start my own car audio store, Audiomotive, just across from the college. That's what ended my college career. If I saw someone looking in the window of the store, that's about all the excuse I needed to cut class and spend the rest of the morning selling and goofing around with car audio.

In '68 I sold the store and moved to California but I never got car audio out of my system. I kept experimenting on my cars and started building and designing 4-watt-per-channel amplifiers in four corners with woofer and tweeters. It sounded great but underpowered. Then I decided to draw the line and cross it. I started working on the bridged amp and concepts that resulted in the first Audiomobile car amp and preamp.

The real key to the early success of Audiomobile was that we sold "a sound" and not an amp. You couldn't buy Audiomobile amplifiers without the speaker system, which used Phillips Dome Tweeters and German Isophone woofers.

Rich Coe was my first employee. He's a totally charming guy, as anybody that has ever meet him knows, and we had already become friends. It was an instant opportunity for me to get him involved in what I was doing with the hi-fi stuff, which he was very into. So he become the first Audiomobile employee, but turned out to be much more than that to Audiomobile and me.

Robert Zeff: In 1968 and '69 I was renting public address setups for Boz Scaggs, Ike & Tina Turner, Buddy Rich and other big acts. I would travel and set up the sound and mix during the performance. I was between 20 and 25 years old at this time and the road trips were long. I wanted some good sound to listen to on the way, so I made an 80-watt amp to run some Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers that we used for stage monitors while we drove.

I built all the amplifiers and most of the other electronics that we used to rent out. Looking back, it would have been so much simpler if I had just purchased what was available. I spent a lot of time at the concerts fixing and replacing the amps that would die. When the amp would go down it would usually take out the speaker with it, so they kept me busy. Getting back to my 80-watt amp, somewhere along the line I was approached by Fred Talkington and Reese Haggott. They suggested that we do a business venture and actually build these as products. The venture fell apart for reasons that are not really clear to me, or important really, but that is how it got started. We built amplifiers out of a house for a while and sold them to people in the local area.

Then we built a little factory inside a Butler metal building that we had on the family farm. We started to actually turn into a company and hire employees. The area was zoned for agriculture and we sort of snuck inside and operated for a few years until an article in the Modesto Bee came out about our company. Then the city fathers booted us out. So we went into town and leased some space and started over.

Rich Coe: Music got me into car audio. In the late '60s and early '70s I was a musician in a rock band and I was always into music and electronics. As a kid, I was always taking things apart and hopping them up. Even back in grade school, I used to go to junkyards and take radios out of cars. That was back when they were tubes. I was always playing with electronics. I was the guy that had the transformer and put wires in the pond and shocked the frogs on the bottom. Sound, electronics, and music all went together for me. In 1967, I put a 45-rpm record changer into my '53 Chevy. That was the beginning of my first stereo stuff. I had Hammond organ springs and a Photorythmicon, it was a light box, and I was always dicking around with the system and setup. Then when I was a musician, we had a Ford E-100 van and we had some Altec A-7500 Voice of the Theaters, 15" woofers with horns, very efficient -- something like 106dB -- and it took very little power to run them. The radio in the car was enough.

Jim Fosgate: My father was a radio and TV repairman and early experimenter in radio and audio. I was always exposed to very good sound in old radios, jukeboxes and early hi-fi systems and what not. I just always loved sound. Back in the '50s, when I was about 12, I built a little audio system for my bicycle with a tube radio and 2-volt rechargeable storage battery. The electronics, set on the back and the speaker, was up in the front on the handlebars. People would just look at me as I rode around, and it had this big whip antenna on it. They'd ask me if that thing worked, and I'd just say "Nah," and then I would turn it on and ride off with it playing. In about 1966, just before 8-tracks came along for the car, I mounted a reel-to-reel tape player in my car and I had enough tapes that I could drive from the West Coast to the Midwest and back again without ever playing the same tape twice.

I was an audiophile and I was playing around with Quadraphonic sound back in the '70s, and I had invented this equalizer circuit that became the foundation for the Fosgate Punch amplifier. I got a patent on the circuit and one thing led to another, and I just wondered what the car would sound like with equalization and more power. So I built one for my own personal use, and the thing totally blew me away, I just couldn't believe what it sounded like. We ended up putting the thing into production.

CA&E: Why chase high quality sound? Also, what did you do right in your career?

Paul Stary: I always built stuff for me, and then if somebody else wanted to buy it that was great. And that's the absolute ass-backward way to do business. But were I to reverse that formula, and do stuff that was marketable, that I did not believe in or enjoy owning or using myself, I would have been very frustrated. Everything I've done has been all for me, including my latest project, an outrageous racing simulator. And I'm the hardest person that I know to please. The only reason that I wouldn't do something better or the best it could be done was because I don't know how to do it better. Many things were done in the early days of Audiomobile out of ignorance. So I brought people into the company that I felt had the ability to do the job.

Robert Zeff: When I was very young, I had a friend who was a musician. I went over to his house and I heard a McIntosh system setup with a couple of Voice of the Theater speakers in this small room. He played this album that was recorded in 1955, Perry Como, Dream on Little Dreamer -- it was already 10 years old but it was the most amazing thing I had ever heard. I thought, Perry Como, my God what is this stuff? I was into rock and whatever, but it was amazing. I just flipped, and I started to get into the extremes -- the louder the better and more explosive transients.

As to the question of what I did right, I would say we developed some really excellent employees. Everybody there really took off with the idea of quality and tight layouts, clean circuit layouts. I wanted a product that, when you opened it up, you would look inside and just say, "wow." Unfortunately people didn't open them up very often, and back then we hadn't thought of what they do now with putting the Plexi' on the bottom and showcasing them.

Rich Coe: Paul Stary lived in the same building as I did, and when all my musical instrument gear got stolen I went to work for Paul. Paul had done a small amp for cars that he called the Stamp 50 SA-600. It was like 18 watts per channel. This was back in the days of the Craig Powerplay, and the Bowman Astrasonic, and there really wasn't much out there then. I was kind of a grunt, and I did whatever was necessary to do, including working on the cars. Paul was kind of an audio purist and I had this desire to keep hearing music the way it was on stage. Ultimately I took this beat-up old Volkswagen that my first ex-wife left me with and I ended up putting 15" woofers in the back, and some Isophone mids and Phillips tweeters in the thing. Fifty watts per channel just wasn't enough, you know? Ultimately it turned into a situation that I started working on power supply technology to get more power. Paul was the business guy in the company and he did a lot of the engineering, and I was this guy that Paul constantly challenged. His line was, "No way man, you can't do that," or, "You can't possibly justify 15's in a car." [This was the Audiomobile 1K VW, a famous and incredible car that started so much! --EH]

We ended up at a CES with this green and primer VW out in the alley, behind the trash cans. There were no outside displays then and I'd take guys outside to hear it, guys like Gene Cerwinski [Cerwin Vega founder]. And it ended up that the next year, we were the first company to have a car in an outside display and one inside. We had people lined up to hear this thing. That's where the boom car started, I'm proud to say.

And I guess the other things that I've done right was that I stayed in the business and the Alpine GAIT program. There were a lot of times when I could have gone off and done other things but I stayed in the business because I love sound, I love cars -- I'm just a gear-head. And I still feel the same way.

Jim Fosgate: I think it was just my love for sound. I totally enjoyed good audio, and I decided very early on that if I could ever afford it, I was going to have some mighty, mighty good audio around me. And it turns out there's nothing better than doing it yourself.

I think the concept of high power amplification with equalization was basically where I was coming from and I think we did that right. A lot of people at that time did not think anyone would spend very much money for a car audio system. So we were ahead of the curve.

CA&E: What are you doing now?

Paul Stary: Well, I'm semi-retired, but I've had all these great ideas swimming around in my head and I realized recently that if these ideas weren't developed in a reasonable amount of time, that all of my energy and ability to launch a company or a product would be gone. I'm 58 now and at my age, 10 years go by in a snap.

So I decided to take the best ideas of my recent life and pursue them in a smart way that also utilizes other peoples' talents and money and that takes into account all the things I have learned from past mistakes. I want to find the best people to run these businesses and then back out of them to the point where I just have an advisory role.

I am very proud of the two projects that I have recently finished: my Dynaudio-based home theater speaker system, sold exclusively through a few select home theater contractors, and VirtualGT. VirtualGT is the world's finest personal racing simulator -- there is nothing more realistic or closer to driving a real racecar. [www.virtual-gt.com]

Robert Zeff: My company, Nikola, is a design company. We do design from concept to proto-typing. In 12 volt we do OEM design for Ubuy and Arc Audio. In non-12 volt we designed a unit for Thermionics that uses a microprocessor to control a high-energy beam in a vacuum chamber for both production and research. We've just done a security product that uses fingerprint ID, another that is a USB camera, and a tattoo power control unit for National Tattoo.

Rich Coe: I'm with Eclipse. My title is Senior Engineer/Manager of R&D. I'm designing product, working within a team that is helping to grow this company. The company feels like Alpine did in 1982 or '83. I'm treated really well here.

Jim Fosgate: I'm in semi-retirement. I'm just kind of watching Pro-logic II roll along. I still design some vacuum tube circuits. I recently did a power amp and before that a preamp. I just recently finished a tube surround processor that is going to be manufactured by Rockford Fosgate. It will be the only analog Pro-logic II vacuum tube unit that will be done.

Here's something that will really surprise you. The very first working Pro-logic II processor that ever went on the air was all vacuum tubes -- it was 21 tubes. Why I did that, I'll never know, because it was very hard to work with. I later had to build two more solidstate versions to really work with the technology and do all the adjusting.

CA&E: What advice can you give for beginners in audio?

Paul Stary: Find someone that understands what good sound is and learn. There is a true sound.

Rich Coe: Be patient and listen a lot. Be kind to your ears. Listen to good home systems and learn what to listen for. Study the basics.

Jim Fosgate: Go out and listen to some live performances without amplification. Hear what the natural instruments sound like. Then go into your audio store and try to listen to the same thing and see if you can find something that sounds like that. Trust your own ears and do your own listening.

"For if I have been able to see farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of these giants." --Sir Isaac Newton (paraphrased)