AES Los Angeles 2014 Presenter or Author
David Derr
Primary Affiliation: Empirical Labs - Parsippany, NJ, USA
From his teens through his 30’s, Dave “played” a rock musician in professional bands. After majoring in music composition in college, he moved to Nashville for a year, and then returned to join a touring and recording group out of the Delaware/Philadelphia area. Over the years, Dave picked up some electronic technical skills just to keep the equipment working. After the band broke up, Dave ran into a senior electronic engineer in a Radio Shack, who encouraged him to come for a job interview at a Bio-medical firm near Philadelphia. This was the start of his electronic designing pursuit, which within a year, lead to a job as an audio engineer at Eventide.
At Eventide, Dave was part of the core design team for the award winning H3000, H3500, and DSP4000 Ultra-Harmonizers™. Working alongside Ken Bogdanowicz and Bob Belcher (both now at Sound Toys), he was exposed to state-of-the-art engineering and the modern world of Digital Signal Processing (DSP). While enjoying the engineering work at Eventide, Dave put together a recording studio, owned by a newly created corporation, Empirical Labs. The Studio was often used to tweak some of Eventide’s Harmonizers™.
The first Empirical Labs product, the Distressor, was designed in 1994, tested and revised for several years, and released in 1996. With over twenty four thousand units sold, it is considered a modern “classic”. Now with a full line of analog processors, Dave and Empirical Labs are returning focus on some digital products, with a first Plugin, the UA Fatso, released in 2010.
More Info: http://www.empiricallabs.com/
Session List
Oct 9:
PD1: The Secrets of Analog Design (Presenter)
Oct 12:
H6: Authentic Replication and Modeling of Vintage Audio Gear (Presenter)
