FROM THE TOP NOEL LARSON I ASHLY AUDIO
well-loved as Ashly is by everyone that used our prod- ucts historically, that the best is yet to come. SWITCHING GEARS A LITTLE BIT. ARE YOU A MUSI- CIAN YOURSELF? AND, IF SO, DO YOU PLAY OUT? I am. I went to music school in Los Angeles, played in bands and loved it. Not as much time to play now, but a lot of the Ashly team are very good musicians or lovers of music, so we talk about it all day. I started playing piano very young. My father is also an amazing guitar-
the table for the next 50 years. Ashly is not resting on its good brand name and shipping products developed 50 years ago. We have just updated two-thirds of our pro- cessors, introduced the MA-Series and EcoTour ampli- fiers, that are all beyond the state-of-the-art, and have a lot more to come, just this year alone. By all indications, our best is yet to come.
HOW WOULD YOU SAY ASHLY AUDIO’S PRODUCTS STAND OUT FROM THE REST? Quality and a dedication to design are key to all new product.
ist, and I believe he started me on piano just so I could play an ‘E’ for him so he didn’t need a tuner. There is this funny mix for all of us in the industry. Before now, I had no gear and lots of time, now I have no time and lots of gear. This is a reason why NAMM has always been close to my heart as well; it was always like the Sears Wishbook come to life. I’m very happy for all of those be- ginning to learn now. I would have loved to have access to all of the amazing YouTube videos showing exactly how to play all of my favor- ite songs.
“MY MAIN JOB IS TO MOVE
First, Ashly products just don’t break. We have a monthly review where all senior management goes through every return, whether in war- ranty or not, to hear if there’s an issue and whether we need to do something to address the issue. It’s a great ad- vantage having sales, engineering, customer service and production all in the same building. We get people asking for service on products from the 1980s, because they’re loved and want to be kept. We try to ser- vice or get them to service whenever possible. Again, this is a key advan- tage of building products in the U.S.
OBSTACLES OUT OF THE WAY OF MY TEAM.”
THAT’S A GREAT DESCRIPTION OF THE NAMM SHOW. WHAT’S THE LAST BAND YOU STREAMED? I love listening to tracks that I know well but broken down and isolated into their parts. I went down a rabbit- hole last week listening to some Eddie Van Halen iso- lated tracks — even scarier when you realize how much was being done by that one track. For full music, I go through genre periods that I grew up on. Right now, a lot of 1980s pop rock, like the Smithereens and early R.E.M. I love the true genius of a great two-minute-and- 20-second pop song. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE BAND OF ALL TIME? My iTunes playlists are super eclectic. I like all types of music from classical to scary guitar stuff. However, the one constant since I was little has been The Beatles. [They’re] amazing musicians and writers. I think the stat is that they released 235 songs from 1963 to 1970. Most successful bands today could maybe do three albums in seven years. IF YOU WEREN’T WORKING IN MI, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’D BE DOING? Per Spinal Tap – a haberdashery? All kidding aside, I like running a business with people I like to work with. I’m not sure of the industry, but hopefully working with people I can learn something with every day. But if that all failed, maybe a test crash dummy for SpaceX. MI
Next, for new products, we don’t just take the previous product, tweak it and say ‘good enough.’ For example, in the new MA-Series amplifiers, we wanted to have power-sharing, but frankly most power-sharing available today is just bad and has a bad reputation. To get around this, the Ashly engineering team used AI to monitor the speakers in a multitude of ways and made thousands of measurements a second and could adjust to the needs hundreds of times a second — not by stealing from other channels and sagging out the sound, but by providing more baseline power. No one else does this. Our new processors had the design requirement to be highly functional compared to anything else available, but not make you go to four days of training to learn how to sign-in to the software. It had to have guidelines built in that didn’t allow you to do harm but get what you needed from the processor. It would have been way easier to just do a part two to our older software, version 42.8, but that isn’t the way we do things here. We needed a more modern software, so we invented it. There isn’t another major competitor that does any of this. WHERE DO YOU HOPE TO SEE ASHLY AUDIO GO IN THE NEXT FIVE TO 10 YEARS? Based on our plans, we have so many new and won- derous things planned over that time. We want to be wherever our customers need us. I really believe that as
36 I MUSIC INC. I AUGUST 2024
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