genius!

'As is not unusual with innovations, it was not something those involved were looking for'

Looking back on the genius of Les Paul, as featured in this month's Genius!4 magazine

The brains behind Audio-Technica's pioneering products - part three

The brains behind Audio-Technica's pioneering products - part two

The brains behind Audio-Technica's pioneering products - part one

Come along and discover what it takes to create something amazing!

“I thought that if we got rid of the wool and got the absorption right [...] we might get somewhere”

“I was frustrated by having to wait for the sound to come out of the computer. So I got busy trying to find a way to get the sound to come out in real time”

“I noticed that singers, especially, much preferred listening to mixes on headphones... In loudspeakers, they don’t recognise their own voices"

"I couldn’t take going to great-looking clubs only to see an ugly black box hidden away in a corner”

To this day, channel EQs based on the designs of Massenburg or fellow pioneers Daniel N. Flickinger and Burgess MacNeal remain ubiquitous

The twin-driver MH212 was the first ever dedicated cone midrange horn

The reel-to-reel Nagra 1 was approximately the size of a shoebox

The D1 was among the first digital compressor–limiters

"Stereo: An obsolescent term meaning a hi-fi system in which two speakers are missing"

"Some of my best ideas come while I'm asleep"

"There were points in the project when I thought, ‘Well, this is just never going to work. What am I doing? I am crazy!’"

"Several producers insisted on getting it NOW one explaining he'd just paid $60,000 to make [unnamed superstar] in tune. Auto-Tune would have done the job perfectly in minutes"

"I almost didn't understand what I had done"

You don’t do heavy metal in Dubly, you know

“I was quite sure that I didn’t want Lab.gruppen to deliver an ‘amplifier with DSP inside’”

High quality signal processing, rugged construction and a compact form-factor were among the elements that endeared Midas to a generation of acts

Our new supplement features the geniuses whose inventions transformed the world of professional audio