What began as the desire for the perfect sound led this artist to create whole new instruments from electronic circuitry.
Inside Gregory Lomayesva’s bedroom recording studio, a large flat paneled monitor dominates one end of the room, but it’s what on the screen that really captures your attention. It’s a computer model of a printed circuit board (PCB) that contains dozens of connections that when routed together make up an emulation of something called a Teletronix LA2A, a legendary audio compressor from the 1960s that has been out of production for over twenty years. The original device can still be found on Ebay – for around $6,000 – but if you really want one and you’ve got the moxie to string it all together, Lomayesva’s company Drip Electronics will be happy to sell you one over the Internet for about $90 – some assembly required.
Lomayesva sits nearby in a chair, fingering the real McCoy- a printed circuit board that he designed and could quickly become an audio compressor – and holding it out towards me.
“Look at it,” he said, tracing his fingers along the connections. “One thing people like about my boards is that they have a certain aesthetic quality to them that other board manufacturers can’t touch.”
And indeed, a Lomayesva circuit board is a beautiful thing to behold, even for those of us who don’t spend a lot of time looking at such things. Heavy green fiberglass borders an elegant patchwork of electronic connections that lead to the spots where the various components – vacuum tubes, resistors, transformers, capacitors and diodes – will be soldered into the board to make the connections complete. Once it’s all assembled, the finished product will live in a box where the circuit board and all gathered parts will be tucked safely away, hidden from view but still doing an important job.
But it still begs the question – why does anyone need an audio compressor from the 1960s? And what on earth made Gregory Lomayesva – better known as a woodworking artist and painter with representation by Ursa Gallery and with his art works at home in a handful of museums and with hundreds of collectors – work tirelessly for the past five years to make this circuit board into the collector’s item it has become?
“What makes an LA2A a desired item for an audiophile is that it contains vacuum tubes as part of its sound processing,” said Lomayesva. “Tube sound has a certain tonal resonance that some people really desire. There’s a whole subculture of people who want these tube amp sounds.”
And Lomayesva has figured out a way to tap into this subculture and create a fledgling business by “cloning” out-of-date gear to printed circuit boards and selling them to audio enthusiasts via the Internet. Since 2006, this artist-turned-science geek has sold over a thousand circuit boards at around $90 a piece, creating a nascent cottage industry based on an obsession with sound – and circuitry.
For Lomayesva, the genesis of this grand project began simply enough, when he was producing an album for his band Micah Sky, back in 2003. Micah Sky was a synth-driven project with a solo female lead singer and its production required a lot of fiddling in the studio.
“I was working on the Micah Sky project and I wanted the sound that can only come from vintage gear,” he said. “Briefly, I had enough budget to work on my album at Stepbridge Studios, who has some of the originals of this gear, but I ran out of that money pretty fast. So really, the reason that I wanted to do this in the first place was that I couldn’t afford the original gear, so why not build some of my own?”
Scott Cadenasso, a Santa Fe-based sound engineer, agreed with some of the basic premises that Lomayesva had about the LA2A.
“It’s got good sound,” Cadenasso said of the LA2A. “You have to figure it like this – these things haven’t been made in thirty years or more, so you can see why people would want to make their own or buy a kit that would let them do that.”
The primary piece of gear that Lomayesva needed for completing his recording project was a good compressor. A compressor is a device which “compresses” the dynamic range of a given piece of music. Audiophiles talk about how a compressor can also add “warmth” to a track, particular a compressor that is from the old-line school of analogue compressors.
Searching on the Internet, Lomayesva found a book on how to make your own LA2A compressor. That particular build involved a process called point-to-point wiring, which required the builder, in this case Lomayesva, to wire and solder each circuit – in this case, over 800 in all. It was not an easy project, according to Lomayesva, and somewhere along the line, he discovered that the more modern way to build the perfect compressor was through circuit board design, which is done with computer programs.
“It literally took years to build the LA2A, between three and four anyway,” said Lomayesva. “What started as some casual dabbling turned into a major obsession. At first, I just wanted to build one for myself – then it seemed like it be cooler to have ten of them, for recording vocals, bass, guitar, and what have you. And if I wanted to have multiples the only way to go was to design a circuit board, because once I had the design perfected, I could literally print them off one at a time.”
Inquiring through the Internet, he discovered the perfect program for making his circuit board design – the Pro-Tel, a $14K program that had a hand in designing the Mars Rover. Typical of guerilla programmers and hackers everywhere, Lomayesva got a hold of a bootleg copy of the software, taught himself the basics and set to work designing his circuit board. As Lomayesva puts it, it took years to build the LA2A, including learning the software, which was supposed to do the schematic of connecting the dots for him.
“It looked awful,” said Lomayesva of the build that result with the program. Ever concerned with the aesthetics of the “look” of the board, he decided to set out to do what many people might consider the impossible – he wired all 800 connections using nothing more than his mouse and a pile of printed schematics.
With a completed design in hand, Lomayesva then printed it to paper and used his skills as a silk-screener to hand-“print” the design directly to the copper plates on top of the circuit boards, using acrylic paint as a resist to hand-etch the design to the board. The first ten silk-screens didn’t work, and while this process satisfied the artist in him, he eventually discovered that you could send the computer file off to a circuit board printing house and get the boards printed in bulk.
He finally released the LA2A circuit board compressor in 2006 to wide critical acclaim on the Prodigy Pro Tools and other audiophile websites. He included a 200-page manual for putting the board together, as well as a comprehensive list of all the additional parts that would be needed to construct the board and make it work as an audio compressor.
To date, Lomayesva has sold almost 1000 boards at $90 a piece. Since his first release, Lomayesva has gone on to “clone” two additional boards, both of them for use as microphone pre-amplifiers. The first of these, the V72, was released earlier this year, again to wide acclaim on hobbyist and audiophile websites, and that release actually led Lomayesva to his latest project.
“I was contacted by a customer who told me that he had a product on his wish list and he asked me if I could build it,” he said. “I told him I’d do it if I could find the schematics, and he produced them for me.”
The product in question, known in the Drip Electronics world as the “forty-seven,” is actually a clone of the Redd.47 microphone pre-amplifier. This is a device that is well sought-after but can’t even be found on E-Bay, though its celebrity factor is well-known, particularly since it was part of the original gear found at the Beatles Abbey Road Studios. This plus the supposed “warmth” and “bigness” (words used to describe the sound of a Redd.47 and other tube devices) of the sound makes it almost certain that, at least in the tiny and interesting world of audiophiles, Lomayesva and Drip Electronics just might have a hit on their hands.
“I’d never give up the art,” said Lomayesva. “But if my electronics company could take off…that’d really be something. Designing a circuit board is like writing a book – every time I turn around there’s more money in my PayPal account for something I already worked on, already finished. And it’s not like the artistry has gone away…it’s just been combined with science for something that’s a blend of the two.”
A blend, perhaps, that has some really big and warm sound to it.
