CRITICAL THINKING
But he had no product and no orders. McGowan was nothing if not persistent. “I went out and convinced a local supermarket magnate … and his son to invest $10,000.”
Tat’s nearly $65,000 in today’s money.
His called his company “Infinitizer, for infinite synthesizer. … I had actually reached out to Walter [now Wendy] Carlos, [who] did ‘Switched-On Bach,’ and [she] was going to be my first customer.”
McGowan had written a long letter to Carlos, including a detailed sketch of his plan for the Infinitizer. Carlos surprised him with a thoughtful reply that included suggestions for improvements. McGowan was probably one of the few people in the world who understood how painstaking and tedious the creation of “Switched-On Bach” had been, because the Moog wasn’t poly- phonic. He understood the thousands of hours that Carlos would have had to spend layering track upon track to achieve the sound.
“With $10,000 in my back pocket,” and no business sense, McGowan “went to a local subcontractor and handed him the entire amount.” Tat turned out to be one of the worst—or best, depending on the viewpoint—decisions he ever made. Te contractor ran off with the money within six months. “It was gone and we were out of business. And that happened pretty quick.”
It was a painful education, and it was hardly inevitable in the early 1970s that McGowan would land on his feet and continue his quest to fuse music and electronics. Indeed, McGowan’s dream and his company were in serious trouble.
“Knowledge is essential, but sometimes, so are ignorance and gut instinct,” he wrote in “99% True,” his 2019 memoir.
THE PREAMP SERENDIPITY “I was supporting myself and my wife, Terri, as a disc jockey at a local radio station,” he said. His “fledgling business wasn’t doing too good at building synthesizers,” but the manager of the station needed new phono preamps.
Phono preamps serve two functions. One is to amplify the small, tinny sound created by the vibrations of the phono stylus in the grooves of the LP. Te other is to address the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) curve.
MIC CHECK
Te RIAA curve, McGowan said, is part of the reason the LP has its name. “Te lower the frequency cut into a record, the wider
During his time in the service, McGowan worked as a DJ for AFN Radio in Germany. (Photo courtesy of Paul McGowan)
the groove on the vinyl. In order to save room enabling longer play, during the disc-mastering process the low frequencies are severely reduced while the high frequency levels are exaggerated. When you play back the vinyl, these frequency differences must be reversed so that it [the recording] sounds correct.”
Without a good preamp, the station would broadcast unpleas- ant noise to its listeners.
At this point, Infinitizer hadn’t yet gone belly-up, but things were not looking good.
Te station manager told McGowan, “ ‘If you build that for us, I'll pay for it.’ So, I went out and figured out how to build a phono preamp.” He had no tools other than books and a soldering iron. Neither did he have any way of measuring how good his phono preamp’s sound was. He went to one of the radio station’s spon- sors and to see if he could test it on the sponsor’s equipment.
Tis was the guy with the stereo store within the waterbed store, McGowan said.
Te sponsor said, “ ‘I’m not letting you hook that thing up to any of my expensive stereo equipment.’ ” Instead, the sponsor said to talk to his waterbed installer, Stan Warren. “So, he introduced me to Stan. I went to Stan’s house. We played it.” Stan liked it a
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