Invention of ToneMatch® Technology
The 2nd generation prototypes consisted a line array of a two Bose MA12 speakers (with a total of 24 mid/high drivers, crossed over at 180 Hz), a single Bose MB4 bass speaker (the equivalent of two B1 bass modules), amps to drive them all and a Bose Panaray controller, set up for biamp and using a standard MA12 voicing curve. When you played a good-sounding commercial CD over this system through a flat input, it sounded “normal”. A great-sounding CD sounded great, and so on.
Each system was driven by an individual 4-channel mini-mixer placed at each musician’s play position. This way, each musician could regulate their own tone and sound level and adjust it according to the other instruments they heard (through the other L1’s) onstage.
Keyboards sounded great. Direct-to-tape devices like the Roland VG88 sounded great too.
But the singing voices were off in terms of sounding like real voices. Shure SM58’s were used and later several other mics were used to see which ones worked best with our system.
It soon became apparent that none of these really sounded like the person singing, which is basically what was wanted: natural voice tone.
From Cliff's work in commissioning big arena sound systems and teaching about how to listen diagnostically, he knew how to make any good microphone sound close to a studio condenser microphone with some judiciously-applied EQ. So he bought some Symetrix 1/3-octave equalizers and patched them into the vocal channels of the mixers and started “tuning”.
It didn’t take long before he got really excellent results, including getting rid of a “wet towel over the windscreen” sound (or “chesty” low-midrange exaggeration) and a “rock PA” low end exaggeration.
The different mics we tried needed different EQ to make the voice coming from the speakers sound like the singer. This was a revelation. Tony and Goodsy of the proto-Linemen both had acoustic guitars with pickups in them. They didn’t sound like the real thing either, but some simple EQ tuning solved that problem too.
Eventually we had a whole collection of equalizers onstage for the tests at Village Hall. Expensive, but it worked great. No one was willing to give up the customized EQs.
When it came time to develop the first product, what is now known as the L1 Classic there was a big decision to be made about the basic architecture of the electronics. Would they be “analog” or “digital”. By that time, a whole collection of different voicing presets were needed for all these different microphones and acoustic guitars and basses with pickups, and a whole raft of other things. Cliff insisted these be put in the product. It was not an option to just have “tone controls”. The system had to be made to work right by identifying the instrument being used and making its amplified tone right.
And so, it came to pass that 99 presets were made available for popular music-making devices. Good tone, easily obtained, became one of the truly valuable qualities of the L1 systems.
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I forget how the next part came to pass. But it had always occurred to me that, seeing as I did all the presets myself and by ear at that, each preset represented my personal subjective opinion of how this or that instrument should sound. The instrument maker wasn’t consulted about this. This actually bothered me a lot. I mean, take the Taylor acoustics I tuned. It’s no mean feat to make an instrument like those that look and sound amazing and beautiful. Then someone buys the thing and all bets are off what they’ll plug it into and what the tone will be when they play it. It could be an old Fender Princeton amp, a 5.1 surround system in a Hollywood studio, AC/DC’s monster PA system or anything in between. The only sure thing is that it won’t sound like what the creators of the instrument had in mind. Actually, given this impossibly-variable tone jungle, the creators of these instruments might really never have had any strong impression of what the instrument should sound like amplified, except that they love the sound it makes naturally. Now, with the L1, here’s Clifford’s opinion, yet another one and not that of the creators.
Well, to be truthful, the L1 is different. It delivers the same tone everywhere. And its inventor is really bugged that he’s the only one making decisions about tone. So what happened next is I found myself talking to the guys from Taylor on the phone and asking them “wouldn’t you like to have some input on how your instrument sounds when it’s amplified using an L1?” It’s never been done before. Instruments and amps have always been developed totally independent of each other. Now here’s the chance to “glue” the instrument and the L1 together with a voicing system that, when it’s all put together, delivers an amplified sound that the instrument’s creators think it should sound like. ( ! ). Amazing, but it’s really true. An instrument and its amplifying system have never really been designed together, with each other in mind, so that the resulting musical tone is natural, so that the amplified tone matches the natural tone of the instrument itself. Tone-matching; what a concept!
So, knowing that my company is very serious about its work and that the L1 is probably what Bose says it is (the future of amplification for the electric ensemble), the guys from Taylor (Brian Swerdfeger and David Hosler, the real keeper of the Tone-Flame at Taylor) and I agreed to get together and make some presets. This was a first for us and a welcome one for me personally. It really goes beyond the realm of business and into something way more cosmic. As creators of these beautiful instruments, they and not me should be the ones that determine the tone of this complete instrument. And that’s really what this is. What we have created, by gluing their guitar to our L1 with the (tone-matching) voicing curve, is a completely independent, free-standing closed-loop musical instrument that sounds like the guitar itself, only louder. Or, in this case, as loud as you really could want. When we were done, everyone was happy. More important, Taylor customers started to write in and say the same. This was the right thing to do.
Within our Live Music Group, we were ecstatic over the implications of this program and started to draft a more formal framework for it. And, of course, we needed a name. In a brainstorm session for this very task, I came up with the winner: “ToneMatch™”. What a guy.
So we extended such an offer to other instrument makers. Our first microphone manufacturer, Audix in Oregon, thought it was a good idea and now we have presets especially for their famous mics. The list now includes many famous instrument makers.
Of side interest is a demo Ken and I did on the L1 when it was introduced. We did it for a bunch of in-house people, notably fancy PhD's and big-brain wizards from the research department. They were very hot about finding out what "technology" we had used to establish the tone matching filters. Amazingly, when I told them how I had done it by ear period, they just nodded "ok". This made complete sense to them. It was an unexpected reaction.