Interview: Pat Quilter of QSC

May/June 2008

Pro Light & Sound in Frankfurt provided an opportunity for Walter Mirauer to do some Q & A with the Q in QSC, Pat Quilter.

The major player that is QSC today had very humble origins, starting life in a small garage unit, making amplifier/speaker combos for the youthful but already booming electric guitar market, which was driven by the dramatic rise to prominence of artists like Jimi Hendrix. These early products, like those from Vox and Marshall met a healthy demand so, I asked,
How were those early days?

“As you might imagine, things were fairly basic. We would make some products, then take them to musicians and sell them. When we sold out, we would go shopping for components, then go back to the unit and build some more. It was very hand-to-mouth and we weren’t very good businessmen. We could do the engineering, but not the logistics of production, marketing, distribution, and stuff like that.......in fact, we didn’t make any profit in the first 10 years or so.”

Despite that, the company clearly did manage to stay afloat, did expand its production facilities, did bolster its management skills and did begin returning profits. Were there tough decisions involved in that?
“Perhaps brave, rather than tough. It became clear that we had reached a fork in the road. We had to decide whether we wanted to be retailers or manufacturers. It was a big decision because direct retail sales returned us higher margins, but we decided to focus on what we did best, which was power amp technology, and to try to increase our output volume. Actually, we wanted to become the world’s largest amp company. You might say that was pretty ambitious back then, but perhaps not today.”

Did anything else change?
“Yes it did. We looked around the marketplace and decided to concentrate our efforts on building reliable, affordable power amplifiers. Through the mid-to-late 70’s, right into the 80’s, there was a real gap in this area, and we felt we had the knowledge and the skills to compete with people like Crown, Carver, BGW.......we had begun to specialise, and we carried that focus right on into the digital era. At that point we recognised that it might be timely to revisit the area of loudspeakers too, which is what we have been doing these past 10 years”

How did you make that work?
“We went out and secured some OEM deals, which effectively guaranteed production volumes, and the next stage was to recruit some rep firms - we’d never used them before - which we began at our first ever trade show, NAMM 1977. From around that time, everyone started to become specialists, and all these companies, speaker manufacturers, amp manufacturers, mixer manufacturers, all fed off each other’s energies, coming together in separate camps and creating a holistic system.”

In the following period, while some others were seeking holy alliances, you concentrated instead on your ‘Main Idea’. The results were first, Series 3, and then, inevitably, Series 1, the prequel. What was the thinking here?

“We felt that we were gaining a reputation as a low end supplier, and we wanted to gain a foothold in the higher end market, in particular studios, and we designed Series 3 for those applications. It is, however, a limited segment, and we were able to adapt the designs to meet the needs of a much larger business, installers. Using the knowledge we had gained with Series 3, we created Series 1 especially for those people.

"So, we moved from convection cooling to fan. We also put the knobs on the back, mainly because it was cost-efficient, but found that customers also loved that, because it kept their settings from being tampered with in the rack. We also noticed that installers often made ‘pigtails’ to connect with the various different input options on different amplifiers, so we decided to put them all on ours - to make life easier for everyone.”

Then, along came the 80’s cinema boom, and another OEM deal for you, this time, with Dolby.

“The people from Dolby Labs wanted to move into rackmount amps as part of their high-powered push into cinema. We went into an OEM deal with them, which worked very well, so that we later had to protect it, in that our own customers were coming to us, looking for the same great-sounding amps. We had a deal with Dolby, so, rather than start selling direct to our customers, we asked them for permission first.”
Full marks for ethical stance. So, what happened then?

“Eventually, we became such a strong presence that Dolby stopped putting their name on our amps and switched to leaving the QSC name on them, and offering it in their catalogue as the Dolby Processor with QSC amp. It became a de-facto endorsement from Dolby.”
And, a success for you, which led you to expand your manufacturing facilities with a purpose designed plant, now followed by a second, even larger one, just in time for the advent of the digital era. By wholeheartedly embracing digital technology, and having meanwhile resurrected an interest in loudspeakers, QSC must now be committed to producing integrated systems, an approach spearheaded perhaps by people like Meyer, d & b, Nexo and so on. Is that where you’re now headed, and, any surprises along the way?

“Absolutely, and, yes, there have been a few. For example, I’ve always felt that many companies stop short in voicing their loudspeakers. I find that surprising since the loudspeaker has the largest impact on what the audience actually hears. Like all manufacturers entering a new line of business, we faced some initial process challenges, but the disciplines we gained making power amplifiers have stood by us well.

In the laboratory, we are finding ways of pushing drive units right up to, but not beyond, the limits of their capabilities, and that’s quite exciting. It’s like, if you want to get another 3dB from a sound system, you can add another half a ton of iron to the rack, or you can make the speaker more efficient. We have made rapid progress, and our expertise in digital technology is helping us enormously.”

In terms of the company’s overall strategy, okay digital is God, and the way to the future, but you have a corporate history of watching and waiting. What are you waiting for, and what have you seen?

“It takes time to earn the right to innovate. We don’t believe in throwing something out there just to see if it works. Our customers expect better of us. We have patiently invested in building a foundation of engineering and manufacturing knowledge, in both digital and speaker technology, and we have attracted some of the most talented people in our industry. Our current products are gaining recognition as setting new standards in product categories that many might suppose were ‘fully mature’. Meanwhile we are working on advanced product concepts that I can’t really talk about now, that we think will open up new possibilities for audio control and entertainment value.”

Just to backtrack for a moment, in 2005, you opened another manufacturing facility, dedicated to speakers. How different were those 42,000sq.ft from your first 55,000.

“Well, very, because we know how to do that now. Our first plant had been assembled, one step at a time, as needs dictated and as funds permitted - one year we’d put in a roller conveyor, another, a soldering station, and so on, so for us to commission, design and build a complete, new, custom facility was a big thing. Barry [Andrews - co-founder with Quilter] had had the same desk, bought from a second-hand shop, for over 20 years. We saw it as what indeed it was, a new beginning. We had to extend in 2005 because what has happened in the digital era is that sound systems have made, and continue to make, quantum leaps forward. What used to take 20 years, now takes four, or even less. So we have to be prepared.”

PLAINLY, QSC’s learning curve for amplification is further advanced than that for loudspeakers, but both areas featured in the new products announced at Prolight Sound, the former with what can only be described as a bread-and-butter product, the GX Range, and the latter with a dramatically updated software package to support their Wideline flagship speaker system. Let’s take the GX amps first. There are two of them, the GX3 and GX5 (300W/ch and 500W/ch @ 8 Ohms, respectively), the first being a Class B design, while the latter adopts Class H topology, the two models sharing a power supply borrowed from the earlier RMX line.

What is your take on these?
“Efficient use of materials in the GX range has fundamentally lowered the cost, while still allowing us a rich feature set. In fact, GX has our widest-ever range of inputs - phono, quarter inch and balanced XLR and, for the first time in thirty years, a QSC amp has a quarter inch output option as well.”

How about the latest version (3.1) of QSControl software, released here in Frankfurt?
“Strategically, we’ve determined that we want to be the next leading player in wide area system management......and a lot of that is about how we present data. For example, if we present a thermal data readout as 90 degrees, what does that tell anyone? What does it mean? What the operator wants to know is whether that reading, that level, is within the system’s comfort zone, or not. How close to the limit is it? Determining that limit is a QSC engineering issue. We determine these factors during testing, and I have many discussions with our digital guys about how we present that information to the user in a meaningful way........It’s all a part of how we want to use digital technology to get us back to putting on a show........Too many performances are too loud, louder than necessary to have musical impact, and that’s not just because we’re all getting old and our ears hurt, but that we’d rather listen at a quality and volume level that is thrilling rather than punishing. Giving engineers the tools to make great sounding shows has to be worthwhile.”

THE LONGER you listen to Pat Quilter, the easier it becomes to convince yourself that the Californian way of doing business and solving problems has a great deal going for it. It is certainly different from the over-driven image of ‘normal’ American business culture. Certainly progressive, it remains laid-back, as if an unseen governing hand is saying, ‘Relax a moment, and check out if this really makes sense’. It’s a quantum leap away from the pressure-cooker, knee-jerk world of Wall Street, and all the better for it. Pat Quilter and his company are powerful advocates for the West Coast Way. After 40 years, I can’t see them running away from their core values, or for that matter, losing any of their core customers.