Rick's Articles

Sound Australasia - Volume 1 : Issue 4 (1997)
The Ridiculous Heater Theory I'm having dinner in a cafe up the road from my studio when a guy I know drives up in his Ferrari, parks out front and walks in. I can feel the heat from his red personality extender as it invades the restaurant. "Gee your car runs hot," I say. "All the good things run hot," he replies, Hmm...

My instinctive methods of assessing the quality and potential usefulness of any new studio toy have always amused me - they just don't seem to work the way other people's do. I'm not so interested in all the new things a box will do for me, but if it's heavy with big knobs and VU meters, I'm getting interested, and if it's anodised and looks like a work of art, I'm probably convinced. But it's not until I instinctively place my hand on the box and feel how hot it gets that I can tell if it's worth further attention.

This is where The Ridiculous Heater Theory comes in. Heat is an audio designer's worst enemy. When audio things get hot they wear out, and pretty soon they don't work at all. Good audio designers really want to create boxes that run cool. If you work on the fundamental belief that they're trying to create a box that sounds good and runs cool, and it still ends up running hot, then it's logical to assume that it runs hot because it has to. In order to achieve their primary goal of delivering first class audio quality, the designer has used high voltage rails, big transformers, and all the other goodies that create heat.

And if after being designed to run hot - it still blows up from time to time, then it had better sound good when it's working. After all, who wants a box that blows up and sounds crappy?

Everybody seems to love tubes, those little glass cylinders with in-built heaters that run hot and 'warm up' your cold digital recordings. We don't want our sound 'cold', but what the hell does 'cold' really sound like anyway? What temperature is right for our sound? Do we just run our sound through something that gets hot in the hope it will be cooked perfectly?

I can remember recording Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers years ago. In the middle of a guitar take, Tom's Vox AC30 guitar amplifier caught fire and started to howl. Tom was screaming "keep the tape rolling, keep the tape rolling..." After the last spark flew from the amp, he said to his guitar tech "Did you hear that sound? That was the hottest thing I've ever heard, I want my amp to sound like that all the time!"

I'm beginning to think my friend with the Ferrari is right, and there really could be some truth in The Ridiculous Heater Theory. The stuff that gets hot sounds pretty good... well, most of it does, anyway. When I look around my studio, the things that get the hottest are the best and most expensive things I own. They're the individual distinctive items that just haven't been replaced with low cost, low heat, low voltage surface-mount technology. They're the things that haven't been replaced by software. They're the things that sound really good. Even the best sounding digital toys I've got run just about hot enough to fry eggs.

The problem with The Ridiculous Heater Theory is that it actually works, just think about your favourite studio toys: Apogee converters, Pultecs, Focusrites, GML, API, Neve, AMS, Lexicon, tube mics, tube limiters, analogue tape machines, digital tape machines, all the good mixing desks... they all get hot. Even your favourite person will probably heat up in a very pleasing way if you press the right buttons.

The Ridiculous Heater Theory is real, hot is good. Next time you're praising a box and its creators, place your hand on top and tell me if I'm wrong. But please don't call me if you burn yourself, because no audio gear should get that hot. The type of people that touch soldering irons to see if they're on scare me and are best kept at a distance.

Anyway, I'm almost finished dinner and my friend with the red hot Ferrari is ready to leave. He offers me a lift to the nightclub he's going to next, but the bar is only three blocks away so I chose to decline the ride and finish my dinner. As we say goodbye, I notice his handshake is cold and clammy like a fish, in fact, his handshake is always cold and clammy. As he drives off, I can't help wondering if he's right. All the good things do get hot.

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