Achilles
Rock Star
- Messages
- 4,972
Actually a good chunk of a work day with him, Alex, and his gear tech at that time - I forget the name.
I worked for an engineering OEM - meaning you'd never find my company's name on any product at a store,
but there's a chance something you buy was designed and developed, and maybe even manufactured by us.
We'd been working with a customer doing smaller specialty products for mall kiosk, checkout aisle type sales
and we'd come up with a concept for a small tabletop powered speaker that looked like a guitar amp and
was geared towards the (at the time) newly exploding digital/modeling sector.
The customer said it was a bit much for their market but they would pass along the idea to some friends.
One of whom ended up being this guy:
en.wikipedia.org
This was around the time that Eddie and co. was really getting the EVH brand going and Evan thought they might be
interested in the concept. The target sell price was in the $99 to $149 range - a consumer product as opposed to MI.
Even came down for a day first to check out the product as well as scope our capabilities. Really nice guy and a cool hang.
Next up was him bringing down Eddie. There were rules: no handshakes, no pictures, no fawning - he was there for business.
Did a nice slow tour of our place - we had full on mechanical, electrical, and acoustical engineering offices and labs, including
a small, but fully walk-in anechoic chamber. Then about 10 of us total did the conference room thing for a few hours - lunch
was brought in and we worked through it.
My memory is hazy and we're talking at least 15 years ago so I don't remember too much about the afternoon.
This is what stuck:
Eddie was a pretty small guy. I'd always thought Alex was linebacker big but he's just normal. Mike, Sammy, and DLR
are all just smaller guys.
The grinning charm from all the pictures and videos never showed up. VERY much business and the guy had some strong
ideas about what made an amp sound good - and he nailed it. Transformers and Filter caps were #1 before anything else,
including tubes, in his mind. This is where I got to really interact with him and make lots of eye contact - which was surreal.
Very cool afternoon!
RIP
I worked for an engineering OEM - meaning you'd never find my company's name on any product at a store,
but there's a chance something you buy was designed and developed, and maybe even manufactured by us.
We'd been working with a customer doing smaller specialty products for mall kiosk, checkout aisle type sales
and we'd come up with a concept for a small tabletop powered speaker that looked like a guitar amp and
was geared towards the (at the time) newly exploding digital/modeling sector.
The customer said it was a bit much for their market but they would pass along the idea to some friends.
One of whom ended up being this guy:
Evan Taubenfeld - Wikipedia
This was around the time that Eddie and co. was really getting the EVH brand going and Evan thought they might be
interested in the concept. The target sell price was in the $99 to $149 range - a consumer product as opposed to MI.
Even came down for a day first to check out the product as well as scope our capabilities. Really nice guy and a cool hang.
Next up was him bringing down Eddie. There were rules: no handshakes, no pictures, no fawning - he was there for business.
Did a nice slow tour of our place - we had full on mechanical, electrical, and acoustical engineering offices and labs, including
a small, but fully walk-in anechoic chamber. Then about 10 of us total did the conference room thing for a few hours - lunch
was brought in and we worked through it.
My memory is hazy and we're talking at least 15 years ago so I don't remember too much about the afternoon.
This is what stuck:
Eddie was a pretty small guy. I'd always thought Alex was linebacker big but he's just normal. Mike, Sammy, and DLR
are all just smaller guys.
The grinning charm from all the pictures and videos never showed up. VERY much business and the guy had some strong
ideas about what made an amp sound good - and he nailed it. Transformers and Filter caps were #1 before anything else,
including tubes, in his mind. This is where I got to really interact with him and make lots of eye contact - which was surreal.
Very cool afternoon!
RIP
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. Ya seeing a pic of him next to warren DeMartini you can see he is pretty small. Also the necks on his guitars which I love =built for small hands which I have too
