The Story of Olive

In 1969, at age 23, I had an ambition to design and build a revolutionary recording console. I had worked for a small recording studio where I could observe how the equipment was used and could see room for improvement. And I had briefly visited a few of the large New York recording studios and get a feeling for the challenges. I was anxious to implement my ideas in a full studio recording console.

Custom recording console for the basement recording studio in Montreal. Small but capable and produced many hits.	Control room of Andrea Perry's small recording studio where many of the top French Canadian artists recorded hits. Andrea is standing in front of the first 16-track recorder in Canada next to the earlier first 8-track recorder in Canada.

I had had an interest in electronics and in particular audio from an early age. I was fascinated by professional audio systems, recording studios, and broadcast studios and equipment. I had built a small audio mixer and tape recorder from scratch when I was 13 and enjoyed the learning experience building audio equipment.

My first audio mixer and power amplifier hand built from scratch. The box on top is the tape recorder remote control.	A three-motor tape recorder I built at age 13 inspired by the famous Amp ex 350 tape recorder found in every studio and radio station at the time. Also my first relay control system to switch modes from play/record, fast forward, rewind.

When I was 16 I managed to get a summer job at a local radio station, CFMB, where I built a production studio with a large U-shape enclosure integrating console, turntables, and tape recorders. A year later, I built a new radio production studio for a friend who was starting a voice-over and commercial development business.

I was fortunate to land a better job in the engineering department in a larger radio station, CKGM, that had the most listened to program every evening, an "Open-Line" program where listeners could call in to discuss topics on a wide range of subjects. Since this meant anyone could say wherever they wanted live on air, we had to develop a short delay system to allow deletion of unforeseen inappropriate material before it was broadcast. Also the simple office telephone system that was being used was not adequate to handle the volume of calls or allow the technical staff to vet callers before they were on the air with the host. So I developed a telephone system, telephone to broadcast interconnection interface, sophisticated user interface and control panels, and the several second audio delay system. I wrote an article for a national broadcast magazine which was published in January 1967 here.

Radio production studio I built for radio station CFMB I worked for in 1964.	Radio production studio I designed and built in 1968 for a friend who produced many of the top audio commercials at the time.

Later at collage, I built a sound system for the auditorium, building the control console using commercial mixers and a custom panel integrating VU meters and several signal routing levers. Then a classmate, Bryan Rawlings, and I founded the college radio station in 1963 and I designed and built a radio broadcast console and auxiliary equipment for this new radio station.

Audio sound system I designed and built for the college auditorium in 1962.	I designed and built the custom broadcast console and the cart machine to its left.

The professional recording industry was growing rapidly in the sixties and seventies as emerging technology allowed the development of new equipment and recoding techniques. Studios were rapidly adopting multitrack recording systems evolving from traditional two-track stereo to four-track, eight-track, sixteen-track, and eventually twenty-four track. This allowed new freedom in the recording process. A recording session grew from a single real-time event to a multisession process distributed over days and perhaps locations, each component added track by track to the master tape. And sophisticated and complex musical performances and effects could be built up layer by layer with detailed fine tuning of sound nuances for each instrument and voice.Then the whole recorded composite package was “mixed down” to the final two-channel stereo release. During this mix-down process, the recording engineer could refine the precise sound characteristics of each instrument and voice with signal shaping devices such as faders, equalizers, compressors, expanders, and reverb controls. Recording and Mix-Down consoles became behemoths spanning several feet in width and depth with hundreds of controls. With so many things for the engineer to oversee, ergonomics and space utilization became very important. I had ideas on how to improve this ergonomics, visibility, and the operation of these complex systems. So, in 1970, I started Olive Electro Dynamics to produce a new console embedding these concepts.

High marks on ambition and innovation but unfortunately low marks on manufacturing experience, business expertise, and resources. The company only built a handful of consoles but eventually succumbed in 1973. But many of the new innovations did make it into the industry.

Wayne Jones

Some additional Stories and Information about Olive...

Caribou Ranch studio stories One of the early studios to install an Olive console was the caribou Ranch studio on Colorado owned by the group Chicago manager. The console was replaced when it became unreliable and put in storage for many years. It was eventually donated to the University of Colorado where it was restored by a couple of dedicated enthusiasts, Craig Patterson and Clark Hagan. Here are some of their stories.

Acustica Olive Plug-In Acustica is a software developer of plug-ins for Digital Audio Workstations. their AI-based software modules emulate a wide range of specific audio hardware products noted for have a particular "sound". They are able to sample this hardware, some of which are no longer available, and allow engineers to replicate the characteristics of some long-gone but sought-after recording hardware. They recently developed a series of Olive plug-ins by sampling the restored former Caribou ranch Olive console.

Audio Engineering Society Toronto 2008 conference on early Canadian audio pioneers. This a from a panel discussion featuring six engineers with stories of audio development and facilities from the seventies and eighties centered in Toronto Canada. Page describing the conference itself.

Pictures from the Olive factory A gallery of photos from the Olive factory and development team from 1970 to 1973 in Montreal.

Product Brochures Scanned copies of Olive promotional literature and brochures.