Behind the Brand: Useful Arts Audio

Date:2020/2/22 16:32:34 Hits:

Useful Arts Audio is on a sound quest. Their mission: to design and handcraft top-tier, boutique pro audio equipment that delivers, in their words, “vibrant, living sound straight from the source.” To that end, their designs use vintage-style Class A circuit topologies inspired by the most coveted gear of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Useful Arts employs vacuum tubes to do what tubes do best — bring out harmonics that increase clarity and euphonic character. Sweetwater was fortunate to catch up with company president Peter Swann, who was kind enough to take a break from his busy schedule and share his thoughts on audio circuit design, subjective listening, and his company’s place in the audio industry.

Sweetwater: Thanks, Peter, for taking the time to speak with us. With vintage-style tube designs proliferating in the pro audio marketplace, there is a fair amount of competition in the high end. Why did you feel it was time to launch Useful Arts Audio?

Peter Swann: Well, as digital interfaces have gotten better and better, and plug-ins have become much more musical, the need for a great front end remains. I feel like most of the really great engineering effort over the last 10 years has been devoted to the digital side, and it’s time to start innovating on the analog side to allow those interfaces to do their best work. Digital gear is great at storing and manipulating sound, but you still need analog to create the sound in the first place. In fact, the better digital gear gets, the more we hear the shortcomings of the analog part of the signal chain. So Useful Arts was founded to provide the tools to create modern sound that doesn’t leave the listener wanting — not to offer just another “vintage” clone. Vintage gear was definitely an inspiration, but the goal is to go beyond that.

The SPF-60 was your first product; so, a chicken-or-egg question: did you come up with the preamp design and then decide to form Useful Arts, or vice-versa?

The preamp design came well before the company. I didn’t start the company until I convinced myself and others that the engineering theory would really deliver something different, special, and … useful. The goal was to contribute something special to music, not just to have an audio company.

In an interview you told Mitch Gallagher, Sweetwater’s Director of Editorial Content, that no matter how much money you spent on gear, you weren’t hearing what you wanted to hear. To your ears, what unique sonic qualities do Useful Arts products bring to the party?

Clarity and intimacy come immediately to mind. Some engineers would describe clarity as the “straight wire with gain,” but I think of it more in terms of the perception of clarity: sound that will pop out of a mix, even on bad speakers at the supermarket. There’s so much that goes into our perception of recorded sound. In addition to the basic specifications you might read (frequency response, noise, THD), there are qualities that are much more difficult to measure — phase coherence, transient response, harmonic content, intermodulation distortion. All these things, managed right, give us the sense that we are there with the performer. To my ears, Useful Arts gear gives the listener a greater sense of being there in the room with the performer, which is inherently exciting. That’s why our gear isn’t designed to be free of harmonic content — it’s designed to embrace harmonic content so that our ears and brains get a more pleasurable experience.

Discrete circuits, tubes, transformers: how are technologies from analog’s golden age integrated to produce the Useful Arts sound?

Each piece of gear we build uses components and topologies designed to produce a sonic result. There’s no single magic formula that applies to every application. I’m not a “tube snob” — there is plenty of great solid-state equipment that has a place in the process.

Why tubes then? Because circuits built around tubes can offer a sound that is more open and “roomy” than their solid-state competitors if done right. And most importantly, tubes naturally saturate in a way that is very pleasing to the ear. Every type of component has its shortcomings. I think it’s an amazingly happy accident that the very first devices people invented to amplify signals have shortcomings that please our ears. So if you design with an eye toward using the inherent artifacts of tubes to their best sonic advantage, you get very sweet sound that’s impossible to replicate with other components. For example, it turns out that when you push a properly biased tube to the edge of its hi-fi performance, the signal gets slightly deformed in a way that a mathematician would describe as second-order harmonic distortion and a listener would describe as exciting. So we use different types of tubes (pentodes and triodes) strategically to impart a blend of sonic artifacts that contributes to sound that makes people smile.

Transformers can impart a sonic “warmth” of their own by introducing distortion and phase shifts that our ears respond to favorably. And we can’t forget the half-transformer: the inductor. All of our tube mic pres have an inductively loaded output stage, which can result in some really high voltage swings in the amplifier and accentuate transients unlike any other component. But these components aren’t magic — they have to be used to their best effect. The BF-1 and BF-S have no input transformer, and that’s a very intentional sonic decision.

Discrete topologies offer a number of advantages over integrated circuits. (Not to say that there aren’t applications where ICs work really well). To my mind, the main advantage is that the designer can make much more creative choices with the use (or non-use) of negative feedback. Math will tell you that negative feedback is a panacea — it makes op amps stable; it flattens the frequency response and lowers distortion. But it also sucks the life out of the sound, and discrete topologies let us minimize or even eliminate negative feedback while still producing great specs.

You’ve stated that you don’t build clones of classic gear; you create designs from the ground up and optimize them to achieve specific sonic goals. What part does subjective listening play in your product development cycle?

Subjective listening is hugely important. You can design an amplifier that looks great in software and on the measurement bench, but if you don’t have a big smile on your face when you plug it in, what’s the point of building (or buying) it? Every one of our products goes through painstaking revisions before we release it. And those revisions are evaluated by human ears, not test equipment. Once the ears are happy, we take the device to the bench to learn what the circuit is doing — not the other way around.

And to that end, every single unit we ship gets a subjective listening test before it goes in the box, just to make sure that it will deliver the sound we want our users to have.

Your BF-1 and BF-S Pro tube instrument preamp/direct boxes sound amazing. Did your experience as a bass player contribute to the design?

Somewhat, yes. But I’ve been lucky enough to consult with some of the best bassists in the world to train my ears — and inform my designs — far more effectively than my own playing would allow. One of the most important reactions I ever got from a bass player wasn’t a comment on the sound, but a comment on the feel he got when playing his instrument. The transient response of the BF series made him better able to sense what his fingers were doing and prompted him to play even better (which I didn’t think was even possible). Bass is a tricky thing to reproduce — at those low frequencies, your ear really doesn’t want phase anomalies because the clarity immediately disappears.

As a young engineer, I was recording a really great bassist, and I dialed in every piece of gear I had to get what I thought was a pretty cool sound. His comment was: “That’s not the clear sound of my instrument.” And a light bulb went off. If the bass is plugged into a device that honestly captures every nuance of the bass, often nothing else is needed. The problem was that I couldn’t find a device that did that to my satisfaction or his. So I set out to do just that with the BF series, while allowing some pretty heavy EQ options when more sizzle is desired on the steak.

Given the vagaries of the marketplace, what went into the decision to establish your manufacturing base here in the USA?

There’s nothing easy about building these designs. They can’t be stamped out on a single circuit board and screwed into a box like so many pieces of equipment. These are handcrafted pieces, and I take pride in the builds to the point that outsourcing was something I just wasn’t willing to do.

The name of your company, Useful Arts, comes from the patent clause of the US Constitution. How cool is that! Have you considered expanding into government contracting — military communications equipment and such?

Ha! There’s actually a classic limiter from the early 20th century that was built for the military, and even had instructions on the chassis for how to destroy it lest it fall into enemy hands. I guess there was a desire to ensure that the other side didn’t enjoy super-fat tone.

These days, the military has much different communication needs than we would be suited for, and I’m happy to focus on sonics rather than pure efficiency.

Useful Arts is unique in the world of pro audio, in that one of its principals — your partner Ben Stiller — is a famous actor. Has this star power opened doors for Useful Arts in the recording and/or film industries, and if so, how?

Ben’s involvement is wonderful, because he’s not just a famous actor; he’s a really gifted producer and director. The coolest thing about how he works is how hands-on he is, and his aesthetic and work ethic translate into every detail of his productions. So he really understands this stuff at a deep level. Not only has he helped expose this relatively new brand to top level producers and musicians, but there’s also the whole world of film production, voice-over, and ADR, which is very exciting.

You have three impressive products under your belt: the SFP-60 preamp and the BF-1 and BF-S Pro DIs. What’s next on the drawing board for Useful Arts?

Two things in the near future.

First, we expect to start shipping the SFP-30 in a couple weeks. It’s a tabletop single-channel version of the SFP-60 that offers the same sound in a smaller package for only $1,299. Handbuilt tube equipment isn’t cheap, and we wanted to make that sound available to a much wider range of customers. We’re really excited about it.

Next will be a solid-state mic pre/DI that will be small enough to throw in a backpack and will come in at a much lower price point. I love designing truly high-end gear, but we want to make great sound accessible to everyone as well.

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