Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design Podcast and excited to dive into the world of professional audio and design and just a really unique space. And we get to do it with two gentlemen that are very well—I could exponentially mention that word—very well versed in this space: Mr. Dave Malekpour and John Songdahl, president and VP of sales and marketing, respectively, of Professional Audio Design. Gentlemen, thank you for taking the time and deciding to spend a little time on the Connected Design Podcast with us.
Dave Malekpour: Hey Rob, thanks so much for having us. I love the concept of what you’re going for with your program and the listenership. And I think we’re all facing some of the same things. So it’s really cool to dig into some of the projects we’ve done to help customers and unravel different parts of the process.
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, I actually want to start and give you guys the chance. We’ll start present day and kind of work backwards into the next question, but I want to give you a chance, for those that aren’t familiar with Pro Audio Design Group, to talk about what you guys have established there, just what PAD Group is.
Dave Malekpour: In starting Professional Audio Design, I saw a need in the market to combine equipment sales with technical services and design services. So I’ve always looked at the market as a way to help people achieve their goals. It always starts with looking at the customers’ needs and then building all the pieces of the puzzle to make sure that those are being addressed, whether that’s the design of the facility itself, the technical integration, or choosing the right equipment.
I think, as gear guys, everybody gets excited about a particular piece of equipment or the whole thing. But I’m excited about a whole system working together to make a great-sounding space that’s reliable for the work that you do. And when I say reliable, what I mean is that what you’re hearing in the studio is what transfers to the outside world, so that you’re getting a real-world perspective.
Along the way, I fell in love with speakers early in my career. It partly started with bringing Dynaudio Acoustics to the United States. We were the first distributor in the world. I’d heard them in England, where they were founded only within the year previous to me hearing them at Abbey Road Studios, which was a cool experience. There was a Japanese client that was looking to buy this SSL console from Abbey Road.
Rob Stott: Wow.
Dave Malekpour: Really cool. But hearing these speakers, I was like, wow, these are really great. It took me a while. I became the distributor for them in the U.S., and we brought it up to a pretty significant level. They ended up selling some of the company. Half of the company went to TC Electronic for worldwide distribution, and TC bought our contract out.
It was a really funny moment because, along the way, I had a client that kept pushing me to make a speaker called Augspurger for him, which was, at the time, a product that you had to do yourself. It was a DIY. Get this design from George Augspurger, choose your drivers, your electronics—everything you had to make yourself.
He said, “Look, I went to a few studios that had these in L.A., and one sounded unbelievable, and the other was kind of not so great.” And I remembered hearing the not-so-great version of it when I was the Dynaudio-focused guy.
Rob Stott: Right. Yeah. Yep.
Dave Malekpour: So what was interesting was we set out to make a pair for him. The funny thing was, it was a place called Unique Recording in New York, where, like, Arc of a Diver and MIDI was at the hotbed of production in the ’80s and ’90s. They were on the forefront of all that. They had a cool studio in Times Square with seven or eight rooms, and we were doing the last room with an SSL console and a pair of Augspurgers.
It was an instant hit in New York at just the right time. We had been making subwoofers already for the Dyns because people needed that extra. This is the transition from grunge rock to hip-hop in the late ’90s. As a rock guitar player, I never thought I’d create the speakers that became the underpinnings of hip-hop.
But taking Augspurger from a DIY product to a commercially made, repeatable product that also was innovative—we changed the way it was created. We changed the electronics outlook and made our own amplifier, got our own drivers produced in the OEM market, and came out with a product that was repeatable. Instead of having a DIY approach to it, we had a really refined product, and we started using automotive finishing to make them have a character to them that was unique to every install.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Right.
Dave Malekpour: We’ve done over a hundred different colors, often associated with a car. The first pair that I painted, not a black pair, was a pair of orange that were for the sons of the Sunkist family. They were building a studio, and they wanted to honor their grandfather. So they said, “Hey, can you make a pair of speakers that look like the Sunkist orange soda can?”
Rob Stott: Wow. That’s so awesome.
Dave Malekpour: I sent that to my paint guy and was like, “Hey, can you make this?” He was a car guy, and he goes, “That’s cool.” There was this orange color that had a little other tint. There’s like a weird green in the background of that orange can.
People started calling me and saying, “Hey, I heard a pair of these speakers that you guys make, and I don’t remember the name of the studio, but they’re orange, and I want to get a pair of those.” So I realized they couldn’t remember the studio name that they were at, but they remembered the orange speakers, and I thought, hey, we’re onto something here.
Rob Stott: That’s pretty cool.
Dave Malekpour: In the aesthetic part of it, that’s right.
Rob Stott: Right, making it personalized for that. It seems like, if there’s one thing, the whole narrative you’re telling—and you guys have a great explanation and deep dive on your website for it—but everything you’ve done and the approach you’ve taken is very much customizing to fit the needs or the wants, just the vibe, really, of that individual or what they’re trying to make.
A lot of people say they do it, but to actually commit to it, talk about that a little bit. And to both of you, John, you as well: the commitment to ensuring that the experience, when any client comes through and works with you, remains committed to being customized and personalized to them.
John Songdahl: Well, that’s what really took us from just being a kind of one-off speaker manufacturer to having a full line of monitors within Augspurger. It started with the large monitors that have two 15-inch drivers and a big, large horn, but that just doesn’t work for every studio out there. Especially in the New York scene, where we have our largest Augspurger presence, the rooms just weren’t big enough to accommodate those big monitors in a lot of cases.
But the engineers still wanted that big sound. So we started the process of downsizing them, going down to 12-inch drivers and then 8-inch drivers. In our most recent series, we have a 6.5-inch driver paired with a horn that, along with a subwoofer, still gives you that big, huge Augspurger sound, but in an amazingly small package.
So much so that people look at it, and they look around, and they’re trying to see, where is that all coming from? And it’s like, it’s sitting right there in front of you. But it’s because they’re used to hearing—
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: Yeah, I wanted a speaker that could sit on the meter bridge, right in front of you. People for years kept asking me, “When are you going to make a nearfield? When are you going to make a small speaker that I can fit in my room?” Because not everybody can have a double 15. It’s a big speaker, big commitment.
Rob Stott: It’s a lot of space. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: You need a well-built room as well, which is also a great lead into, for a long time, I used to represent other designers. First with Andy Munro, I worked with him extensively and was his agent for the U.S. market because he was the guy who designed the Dynaudio speakers. Even after we had parted ways with Dynaudio as the distributor, we still kept a special relationship with the custom side because we still were putting them in for a long, long time after that transition, even when we were making Augspurgers.
In fact, we had a studio in China that we designed and built with WSDG where one room was Dynaudio and one room was Augspurger. To this day, now there’s something like 50 pairs of Augspurgers in China.
Scaling up the business to try to meet the demand when you’re also hand-finishing—each speaker that has a custom finish like that may be a 12- or 15-stage process of preparation, sanding, hand-sanding every single layer. And then there’s curing time. Some paints you have to spray four hours after you did the underpaint. Other paints you have to let cure overnight, or even more. Some of them have to cure 48 hours before you can even touch them.
If you’re trying to create something that’s like a luxury finish, like one of our clients wanted Bentley Ghost White, that’s another level of finish than using our premium performance white that’s on the Yukon Denali. But these are colors that people can recognize. We’re doing a pair of speakers right now in Hermès orange. It’s a very specific color, and it matches the inside of a Rolls-Royce.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: The client has that car and wants that color. It also has a starlight ceiling, and that’s what we’re putting into his studio. So he wants to feel like he’s in his luxury environment at all times.
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: I think that’s part of it, understanding what the client needs and wants to be creative. We’re very fortunate in that a lot of our clients are successful in their market, so we’re able to provide them with a tool at the high end of the market that’s really refined and can be tuned.
You mentioned personalization. It’s actually one of my favorite things about the brand because we personalize the finish, as we were just talking about, but we also personalize the sizing of it to the room, and the curve is personal. The engineer has a curve that they’re connected to that’s tuned to them. And while it’s tuned to them, it also hits a standard level that we’ve created.
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: So if you’re at Snoop’s studio or Roc Nation, or you’re at any one of our clients, you can lay over a measurement and see that they’re all relatively within a couple dB of each other at all frequencies. That Augspurger sound and performance is about that reliability of the mixing curve. So if you’re producing and your kick drum sounds great, when you get to the mix stage, they’re hearing it the same way you heard it in the studio.
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: I think that is time-saving, too, for an artist, but it also keeps the creative flow going. It’s reassuring when you go out to your car. One thing people have always told me for years is, “Yeah, it’s always going to sound great in the studio. It only counts when I get to my car,” right? Because we’ve also had the experience as engineers, or artists particularly, where something really changes when you get out of the studio.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: Whether it’s the bass, the vocal, or the guitar, each one of those perspectives is no good, right? We want to make sure that everyone’s hearing it exactly as they heard it in the studio. So that’s been one of the fun things.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
John Songdahl: Something else that should be added to that is one of the things that make Augspurger unique is, unlike pretty much every other speaker out there, Augspurgers are very linear and consistent from their lowest volume to their loudest volume. Everybody’s had that experience where they’re listening to something, and it’s like, it just doesn’t sound good unless I turn it up.
Rob Stott: Right.
John Songdahl: That’s the issue that a lot of studio monitors have, which is, when I turn them down, I lose all the detail. I lose all the magic that’s in the mix, so I have to use them loud to get to where I want. And Augspurger, just because they can go really, really loud doesn’t mean that that’s how they’re used most effectively. What our engineers find is that what makes them so special is you turn them down to 80, 85 dB—
Dave Malekpour: Seventy-five dB.
John Songdahl: —and they are hitting you with the same impact that you would get if you’re playing at 100 dB. It’s not like they’re deflating, which is that sound that you hear with inexpensive speakers when you’re not just absolutely driving them.
Rob Stott: Right. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: Well, just to add to that, one of my experiences was tuning Teddy Riley’s studio. There’s double 15s with double 18 subs. He’s obviously an incredible R&B producer. I’ve worked with him for over 20 years myself, but he’s had a lot of different incarnations of him, too. So it was really fun to go and sit there with him and tune.
He goes, “Dave, I bet everybody asks you how loud these things could go.” And I was like, “You know what? Everybody wants to make sure that they can turn them up all the way.” They do. It’s one of the parts of the tuning process. Go all the way up, make sure it’s not going to blow up, and make sure you get as much out of it as you can before it erupts.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: But he goes, “Yeah, I want you to see how quietly I work.” He went to the first click on his Dangerous monitor controller, and it was in the 60s.
Rob Stott: Wow. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: The 65 dB range, really low, like talking level or below. And he goes, “This is what I do. I sit here, and I listen first. I listen to the whole mix, and I’ll solo the kick, and I’ll solo the bass and the vocal. Then I’ll go back to listening to the whole thing at this level. This is where I work all day. Until I can have the mix where I can hear the definition of the hi-hat, the snare, the kick drum, the vocals pronounced at this level, I don’t turn it up.”
He’s like, “Yes, at the end of that, I’m going to crank it up and make sure the bass doesn’t blow apart or something like that that you can’t totally tell until you crank that up. But I can hear that the bass line is there. If I don’t hear that at this level, then I’m fooling myself at any other level. As soon as I learned to mix like this, my mixes got better. The only system I can do that on is yours. Because every other system, when you get low, you lose the low end. You lose the definition in the mids and the clarity.”
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: So it taught me something after years and years of doing it. Now I spend a lot of time in my tuning process listening at both high and low volume. It’s just a really great way to uncover. A lot of people volunteer, “You know what? These speakers are also the best nearfields.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” They’re like, “You just turn them down, and you can hear the entire range that I can’t hear on my small speaker.”
Rob Stott: Smart. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: Not to mention, if you’re a bass player or you’re doing a bass line on a keyboard, especially for something like dance music, pop, hip-hop, reggae, reggaeton, all of the different genres that really have a feeling to them, if you can feel that music while you’re playing, you’re going to put a different attitude into the recording.
If you’re playing a bass and you don’t hear the low end, you might dig in harder. When people track a bass guitar on a small speaker, it’s often very hard to get the dexterity that you can get when you can turn it up a little bit more and feel like you’re standing in front of your SVT, and you feel the movement of the driver. So you’re going to put just one more percent of extra good in there.
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: What I find is that when you put an artist in front of these speakers, they put that extra good that they get from that experience back into their music, and they can take that with them. That’s, I think, the difference of working with a speaker that’s emotional. I always like to say that our speaker is the most emotional in the market.
Rob Stott: Yeah. It’s awesome, and I think it shows, too. You mentioned some of the names. You look at your website, and the client list is impressive. So I want to give you the opportunity. Obviously, there’s a lot of trust in that, and word of mouth, things like that. I’m sure sales and marketing has a role to play in getting the name and brands out there as well.
But you talk about the early days, because you have to make a name, right? So how does one go about cracking that scene and getting into that, and being able to leverage it in the ways you have and the other environments that you have over the years?
Dave Malekpour: Two or three things happened along the way. I have to say that timing was part of it, but also having a different approach, taking a different approach than other manufacturers might have, maybe because we weren’t trying to make a mass-produced product from the start. We wanted to make the best thing we could make. So everything I’ve ever built and designed was based around the best components, the best electronics, because I wasn’t constrained with mass production when I was conceiving of the beginning of the product.
In some ways, it’s grown out of a need to hit more and more types of customers, like John was talking about, the Solo 12 or the Duo 8. People wanted the Augspurger sound in a smaller room and a smaller budget. Today, we’re working on a new product line that’s going to be previewed, hopefully, at the AES show coming up. We plan to show a preview of our new product line that we’re going to be rolling out over the next 24 months, which has quite a few models in it and is designed to hit a broader user, both price- and size-wise.
But also because we’ve been able to reengineer some of the time-consuming parts of the manufacturing process while retaining the quality of the end result. We tried different materials. Hey, could we cut back from using maple? Could we make a 3D-printed one? And when we start listening to them, at the end of the day, this is about how it sounds. Like I said, about not settling for price, but settling for quality, right?
So the number one thing in developing a new product is that it doesn’t change the design language. It doesn’t change the performance expectations or the brand reputation. It has to deliver on those. What we had to do is figure out how to cut out costs and how to make something impressive that has the Augspurger sound and power.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: And deliverability of a reliable mixing curve, and maybe multiple curves that don’t require a professional like me to come out and set it up for you, unless you really want to invest that extra, that last little few percent that you get from a personalized tuning. But this system will come with a number of presets in there that probably fit about 80% of users right out of the box.
We’re also rolling out a program for a certified Augspurger tuner. In the past, myself or a couple of our guys that are really well trained under my wing are the only ones doing the tuning. We’re going to open that up to certified tuners that have some experience in that market and get trained and certified by us. They’ll be able to be booked through our client referral program.
Especially as we’ve been passing the 2,000 installed system mark, there’s only so many Dave hours in the year that I can be on the road. A few years ago, I was tracking my hotel nights, and I was in a hotel 120 nights.
Rob Stott: Whew. Yeah, that’s a lot. That’s quite a few.
Dave Malekpour: It’s a third of the year. I wanted to be home a little more, having family and all that. But I think the way that we built it was through word of mouth, through customers who had the systems. That was the first building block.
One of the lucky things that happened after Unique convinced me that this would be good for me to get involved with making the speaker was, two weeks later, Right Track Recording, which was right around the corner on 48th Street, wanted to get them because they heard them, and everybody was buzzing about it. Then Young Guru, who was Jay-Z’s engineer, heard them. We had just built Jay-Z a room called Baseline that I designed right around ’97.
So he’s like, “Dave, we’ve got to take the Tannoys out and put those Augspurgers in and get those new subs.” Before then, I was selling Bag End subs that were good, but the subs we make today, and even back then, were just one more step up. I was always trying to stretch the limits with power.
Rob Stott: Different level, yeah.
Dave Malekpour: I’ve had some really interesting experiences. I was working in a nightclub as a bartender just when I started the company, and they kept blowing subwoofers all the time. The owner heard that I had been a pro audio guy, and he goes, “Well, what can we do?” He gave me a little budget, and I bought some bigger power amps.
He goes, “But we’re already blowing them up. Why are you buying these giant power amps?” I go, “Trust me. If I’m wrong, we won’t buy any more. But if I’m right, we’re going to outfit the whole facility over again.” And they stopped blowing up drivers.
You went to the basement of that building, and there were hundreds of blown 18s in the basement. They didn’t know what to do with them. Reconing for an 18 is not as reliable as maybe other drivers that you can recone. You can recone it and have to fix it again the next day. So solving the problem was interesting to me.
Rob Stott: Wow. It’s wild. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: I didn’t think about it at that time, that that was going to help me later. But when I started building Augspurgers and making these subwoofers, which was actually the thing that led me to feeling like I could make a speaker, I had been making these subwoofers with this contractor I found that had been doing custom EAW speakers for EAW. So I was like, “Hey Gary, can we make this? Can we make that?” Then I would just put the biggest power amp I could get on it.
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: People thought I was kind of crazy. It’s like, “Wait, this driver’s rated for 500 watts, and you’re putting 2,000 watts on it.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.” We could move so much air and control it. In some ways, that’s the magic of Augspurger, right? We have headroom for days. We don’t ever run out of headroom.
Rob Stott: Make it happen. John, too, I know most people in a business, whether manufacturer or integrator, think to themselves, it’s awesome, I’ve got to go get my testimonials and things like that. The testimonials on your site aren’t from standard customers that bought a pair of speakers and give it a five-star review. You’re talking about being installed in some pretty powerful studios and used by some pretty incredible artists.
So talk about, from your seat, I have to imagine that is exciting, for one, but also super important in terms of what you’re able to do.
John Songdahl: Absolutely. The thing about our clients is we develop a very close relationship with them through the process because it is a custom product, and it is something that’s being specifically optimized for their room. So by the time Dave’s there and doing the tuning and really keying into what the customer’s personal mix scenario is: What are they looking for? Where are they looking for the highlights and the definition? Where are they looking for the reserve when they need it?
Then Dave will massage the tuning so that it really—it’s almost like going to an audiologist and having a pair of hearing aids tuned to your ears, but you’re having the whole room tuned to your ears. That gets the customer so excited about the fact that, I can get a good mix anywhere, but in my room, I am the chief, and this room is mine.
Rob Stott: Mm-hmm.
Dave Malekpour: A great segue is to what happened along the way: I realized how valuable the room was. So it wasn’t just the speaker. The speaker is super important to everything because we can dial it in, as John was talking about, with the tuning. We were one of, if not the first in the industry, to have a speaker in the studio that had a digital tuning engine as part of its initial concept.
Then we started using amps that had DSP in them that are tunable. Even today, a lot of our competitors have some tunability, but they don’t have a full-on tuning engine that requires you to tune the speaker. They give you a five-band EQ or something like that to tweak it. But my approach has always been to optimize.
One of the things I learned along the way early on is that a third-octave EQ, which is the old way that everything was EQ’d, is completely useless because most of the problems in monitoring are very small. So there are a series of small cuts and boosts to get a really natural sound, and that’s what we focused on. But I also realized, wait a minute, we need to control what the room is doing.
In our best scenario, people hire us as Malekpour Design Partners. This was born out of having represented other designers for a long time and still driving the project ultimately and saying, this is what the customer needs, and understanding the artist. As a musician and a songwriter and a producer—and John’s an electronic musician, toured the world with his instruments—we have a user perspective that we bring to every project.
I’m still involved in recording and writing music. I spent one of my vacation weeks making a little pop-up studio to work on some music of my own. That’s one of the things we love, just making music. So we bring that into our listening. We bring that into our design. Now Malekpour Design Partners is about 10 years old. In January, we’ll go into our 10th year of designing studios.
We’re focused the same way as I was with the speaker design on the studios: How do we make it the best for the space, for the budget, for the purpose? We have clients that are very purpose-focused. They’re a mastering engineer, or they’re a producer, or they’re a mix engineer. Some of today’s mix engineers are just so focused on that one craft that having a killer mix and control room is all they really need and want. Then we have other clients that are recording records, and they need to be able to record drums and vocals and violins one day, and a keyboard or a beautiful piano the next.
We recently completed a multiroom studio that’s all around commercial recording. They do JetBlue and Toyota and everything, TV commercials all over the country, as well as web audio and radio stuff. You go in there, and the Progressive commercial’s going, and there’s some duck on skis, and there’s noise being made. The guy at the controls makes all of the sounds, all of them, and voices and everything. It’s crazy. He has a hundred voices up his sleeve somehow.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: So to understand what each person does, or each client does. It’s interesting that the client profile has changed over the decades that I’ve been doing this. It used to be that every studio was kind of a hotel that could serve anybody, and now we’re really purpose-oriented. So many of our projects today are a client that’s a producer.
I just was out in L.A., and I was looking at a piece of property. We’re going to build a building from the ground up on the property as an ADU, which has been probably the fifth one of these that we’re working on right now. It’s going to have a control room and a live room and a hang space and a little bathroom. That’s where he’s going to be going to work every day instead of paying for a separate space that he has to go across L.A. and spend an hour each way. When he has an idea at five in the morning, he can run across the yard in his underwear if he wants.
Rob Stott: Wow. Mm-hmm.
Dave Malekpour: More and more, we’re seeing artists—we have people like Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg, Ty Dolla $ign, The Weeknd, so many interesting artists that have their own studio spots. It used to be that someone would say, “A bedroom studio.” No, these guys have real studios, but it’s dedicated to them.
Rob Stott: Mm-hmm.
Dave Malekpour: They don’t need to charge money to other people. Sometimes they get other people asking them, “Hey, can I use your room?” If it’s their buddy, they’re going to be, “Yeah, I’m going to be on tour this month. I’ll hook you up with the manager. She’ll get you in.” Or they do writing camps in their absence, stuff like that.
We have Carter Beauford from the Dave Matthews Band. We redid his studio, and he has a pair of Duo 8s and a Sub 212 system in his room, and we put a Neve Genesys console in there. His whole thing was being able to make the best-sounding drum recordings because people send him tracks, and he wants to send them back. He was doing all the music for ESPN for a while, and he still does a lot for them. He does the entry music.
Again, going in there, hearing what’s in there, and then hearing it on TV and going, actually, that’s what I heard in his studio. It’s a great feeling.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome. That’s really cool. The cool thing, too, you mentioned all these use cases and how it’s changed, and I want to dive into that separately in a minute. But we’re talking a lot, obviously, about recording studios and music. I know, too, you guys recently—we actually featured it on Connected Design—you were in a workout studio, the fitness center.
Dave Malekpour: Yeah, FORM50 Pilates.
Rob Stott: So the versatility of what you do and being able to install it in these unique spaces. Considering some of the artists you’ve worked with, asking one of the most unique spaces, if you remove the artists from what you do, because I’m sure they’re all really unique. FORM50 is just a very different, off-the-wall type of application that might not come to mind when someone thinks about the work you do.
Dave Malekpour: Well, I like to think of the intersection between acoustics and electronics, right? So electroacoustics is probably the proper term, but it’s combining a space and the audio system to provide what you need. FORM50 is actually kind of a cool project because it needed acoustics. It was a big space. Before the acoustics went up, we had the system up, and we turned it on because there was a little, “Do we really need to spend money on acoustics?”
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: I was like, “Well, let me show you what happens if we don’t have any.” It was like you’re in a train tunnel, and you can’t hear anything. The minute we put the acoustics in and we tuned it—we tuned it the same way we tune a recording studio. On top of that, we were able to tune for the microphones that they were using, using a piece of software in the processor that we employed. We used the Symetrix DSP processor that allowed us to do all kinds of stuff, including having separate locations where you could turn up the mics or turn up the volume of the music.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Right.
Dave Malekpour: Because if you’re an instructor and you’re halfway down, you didn’t want to have to run back all the way around. So we have a couple of those, and just thinking through the use case of how do we make a great-sounding space. With the owner, she’s really keyed up on having a uniquely special place that people come in, can feel relaxed.
Rob Stott: Right, you’re running all over. Yep. It’s pretty cool.
Dave Malekpour: What she realized is that having great sound makes the workout better because people’s ears don’t feel weird at the end, even if it’s a little louder because you have an instructor and you’ve got music blaring. It actually sounds good, and the instructors want to hear that their voice is easy to hear without having it feed back or be too loud.
So while it’s not a recording studio, it’s a music environment where people are paying a lot of money to work out in a spot. If the music’s bad, they’re not coming back. I promise you that. They’re going to go to the next place that has a good playlist and has the bass hitting them in the chest while they’re getting their groove and their sweat on.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Right.
Dave Malekpour: Now we’ve taken over all seven of their locations, from Boca Raton and Miami to five in the New York area, and more coming, I guess, from what I heard, which is good. But one of the things that the client said to me, because we only took over in the most recent studio, and now we’ve redone a bunch of the other ones, was that our expertise was interestingly valuable because no one ever explained to her the value of certain things, or why one system over another.
Or just having people that are used to also working at that pro level where everything has to get done, and we’re racing to deadlines at all times because we’re kind of semi-GC-ish in our thinking about executing a job. So we’re just as keyed up, and I actually was able to help her with a lot of other things, with the materials, different things along the way.
She just mentioned something. I was like, “You need financing for this? Everything we sell is expensive, so we have a lot of great financing.” I put her in touch with our financing team, and she got financing for the system and hadn’t ever thought about financing.
Rob Stott: Just don’t think about it. That’s pretty awesome.
Dave Malekpour: All of the other studios they did out of pocket. So now she’s like, “I could make a new studio for so much less money and get it running and make money.” One of the things about being in business for 37 years is business. I didn’t realize just how much my experience was also valuable.
That’s where it’s fun working with a business owner like a FORM50 or a Quad Studios. To me, they’re the same. They have to make money. They have to exist. They have to keep their clients happy.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: They have to sound good. They have to work every day. We can’t go back to last Tuesday and go bill for it if we didn’t have a customer in there.
Rob Stott: Yeah. John, I see you look like you want to say something.
John Songdahl: I was just going to add that this builds on the core principle that was uncovered in Augspurger, carried on to a completely different audio system and in a completely different environment, which is that distortion causes ear fatigue. People that are listening to distorted stuff coming out in a health club are going to stop their workout a lot sooner than people that are hearing clear, undistorted music.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
John Songdahl: Same thing with speakers. If you’re mixing on a pair of speakers—and I’m not talking about distortion like a Marshall amplifier. I’m talking about distortion that happens at the amplifier level and really starts to grate on you because of the way the frequencies are affected.
When you take that out, all of a sudden, you’ve got something that’s not only clearer-sounding, but you’re much more comfortable with it for long periods of time. So carrying that from the speaker to the room was just a natural extension of our experience.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Well, it’s cool, too. Is that the most out there? I want to give you both a chance to answer that. Is there another example of you taking your talents, to quote LeBron James, to an area outside of your standard audio, the mixing rooms, or anything like that?
Dave Malekpour: To be honest, we’ve done all kinds of things. John will tell you, in the last year, we’ve done three different school projects, adding acoustics and audio equipment into rooms. John did a church with both acoustics and audio and upgraded the entire facility and made it sound great when it was having all kinds of intelligibility issues. It was an old place with a really big proscenium and a really wide stage. So trying to get a cohesive place where people could really hear the sermon.
We recently did a consultation for a luxury high-rise complex out in L.A. They’re building, I don’t know, like 50 luxury units, and no one wants to hear the toilet flushing or the dog barking next door or the kids’ music in the adjoining apartment. So we helped them design and model the isolation system for their building.
Rob Stott: Right.
Dave Malekpour: We get called in for that type of stuff, too, even by other designers. We’ve helped some people with their isolation planning, and we work in concert with a few other design people. A lot of our projects in resale go through other studio designers. Once we had that dialogue going, it’s like, by the way, we have this great isolation mount that I created.
John Songdahl: Yeah, that’s a good point. There are times when there’s not a product out there that will do what we need it to do. Dave found an opportunity with isolation, looking at all the different isolation systems that are out there and asking the simple question, “Well, why hasn’t anybody done this using silicone?”
He brought it to a fabricator to put an idea, a concept, to actual manufacture, tried it out, measured it, and basically developed a new isolation product that provides better isolation than any of the competitive products out there for about half to maybe a third of the price, depending on the quantity that you purchase.
Dave Malekpour: And better.
John Songdahl: Yeah.
Rob Stott: That’s awesome.
Dave Malekpour: We thought we could launch its own little division, but it’s been a lot harder to get that traction across a wide swath. We probably have about 20 builders using the product currently, and it’s growing a little bit at a time.
John Songdahl: And it’s our secret sauce in our builds because we’re able to—
Dave Malekpour: Yeah, it’s in every one of our designs. I think that’s a good example, in some ways, of the ecosystem between Pro Audio Design, Malekpour Design Partners, and Augspurger. Sometimes someone needs something really custom. We have a client in Brussels that bought a system from Augspurger, and the designer never used Augspurgers, knew nothing about them.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: So I did a whole thing, and we actually did a drawing of how to soffit them and where to place them. I took their drawings, and I placed our speakers in their room, and then gave them all the tools and ingredients for them to do it the way they wanted. But hey, here’s the dispersion, and here’s the way to soffit-mount it, and here’s the way to isolate the speaker.
The guy sent me back an email. He goes, “I’ve never had a manufacturer so helpful and that could give me the tools. This is incredible. This is part of Augspurger?”
Rob Stott: You’d think that’d be—
Dave Malekpour: Well, Augspurger has to be sure that when this speaker goes into the first room in Brussels that has them, that they sound amazing. So I’m going to go over there and tune them, too. He’s like, “Wow, this is so cool.”
I was like, “Hey, what we found is people like yourself are the best agents for us to find new customers.” He goes, “So I could offer these to my other customers?” Absolutely. So the product becomes a bridge and relationship builder, both with the customer, with their engineer, with their clients and their artists. Even their designers become part of our value chain.
Rob Stott: Right. It’s just funny, you’d think that would be the standard, to be that way, because there are two sides of it. One is you want that client to be happy, and exactly the point you just made about them being that conduit to other potential clients and things like that. But also, you have a brand standard, I’m sure, you’re living up to, a reputation that you’ve got to uphold.
Make sure that if anyone else is coming in and listening to it, they don’t have that negative first experience because then they attach that, and all that brand equity and everything you’ve done there kind of goes kaput. So super important, for sure.
I feel like I could talk to you guys for an entire day. I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want to ask one more thing before I let you go. You mentioned it a little bit ago, about the way designs have changed and being more personalized with what a client might need and how it impacts the way you design a space.
Dave Malekpour: No doubt. Sure. Absolutely.
Rob Stott: Thinking to how you got your start, what the priorities were then to what they are today, if you had to single out one of the biggest changes in how people think about a space, what’s important to them today, all-encompassingly, the entire listening room experience or what it is that you guys create, what is that number one priority today, and how much has that changed over the course of your career?
Dave Malekpour: It’s hard to put it on one thing, but I could give you a combination of a couple of elements that together have really shifted things. Over time, the budgets have shifted at the production end, so the budgets that artists are given, therefore studios get, therefore the money they have to work with, has changed.
We’ve had to adapt our design work around lowered budgets, and not always. We have some projects where budget’s no issue, and some of the top clients—we’ve had several billionaire clients—it’s like money’s not the thing. But for most people today, they have to really get a lot out of the investment that they have.
There’s a couple ways to make that really work. One is to get it right the first time so you’re not redoing anything. That’s where professionals like us really can bring value to a customer. Even sometimes people think, “I don’t know if I can afford you.” It’s like, “Actually, we’ll tailor our services to your budget.” But we have to be thinking creatively. Sometimes that means you have to give up something you really wanted. You just have to be able to be adjustable.
But what I see the biggest thing is today is that we have to be able to create things that are valuable at a price. So the budget has this piece. The other piece is that we’ve come up with a lot of materials that we can get much higher results from for less money. Things like the IsoRaft is a really good example of it. If you went from $30 a decoupler to $10 a decoupler, and you need a thousand of them in a project, it’s a significant reduction in cost.
Rob Stott: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: One of the things that we’re working on right now, and we have one of our first rooms going in, is modular studios. We’ve identified that a lot of people have a space that they don’t own, or it’s in their home, and maybe they could get their wife to agree to give the garage, but they don’t want to turn it into a permanent room that, if they sell the house or they upgrade, they can’t have a garage for sale with their house.
We’ve created, with our partners at JOCAVI, a modular studio program that we’ll be showing at the next NAMM show. It’s a professional room. You can have your speaker wall-mounted in the front just the way we would do it in a normal build, but in a modular way. So you can essentially order your room to your specs. There are some parameters that are fixed, but most things can be malleable to whatever space you have.
It really fits for a lot of people. Let’s say the homeowner that doesn’t want to change the residential structure, or someone that’s renting a space and doesn’t want to put $100,000 or $200,000 worth of construction into a building they don’t own with a five-year lease. If, in five years, you could unscrew the thing, take it to the next space, add more panels if it’s a bigger room, shrink it down if it’s a smaller space. Sell your house, take it out of one garage, move it to the next one.
The really cool thing about it is we can build them in about six weeks of manufacturing. It’s about 60 days from order to delivery. Then let’s just say another couple weeks to get it in the room and set up. But you can be recording in your new room in under 90 days. In most cases, you don’t have to have building permits. It just eliminates a lot of things, including a builder.
No offense to builders, but where do you want to put your money? Do you want to own your room, or do you want to pay a builder to put a bunch of materials in your room? Now, if you’re building a real facility, building makes sense. But even then, a couple of rooms that you could order and be in in 90 days—a lot of people, when they sign a lease, get a 90-day or maybe four or five months of free rent. If they’re signing a 10-year lease or something like that, they might get a longer free period for that development time.
We see a lot of times when people are developing, they sign their lease, and then they call and hire someone like us. By the time the design is done, maybe they still have some free rent period, but it takes time to build. In New York City, it might take you six months to a year, depending on permits and the contractor’s availability and getting everything organized and financed. So this cuts out a lot, and it also can cut costs dramatically.
Rob Stott: Yeah. That’s awesome.
Dave Malekpour: We recently quoted a job with traditional building. The number was about a third to get a modular room, and a third the time. So we see that as a reflection, and we believe that we’re bringing this to the market at just the right time.
Rob Stott: Wow. That’s awesome.
Dave Malekpour: The ecosystem, the budgets, and some of the residential considerations. But look, we love to build traditional, and we have, I think, right now about 12 different projects in some stage between design, build, completion, and install. We tend to be adding one to three projects a month, and that fits our capacity pretty well.
Rob Stott: Well, John, too, the same question. The things you’ve noticed over the years that have become that top priority, how has that changed in your perspective?
John Songdahl: The main difference is when I started here, our main clients were the big commercial studios where you had a console, you had a pair of big monitors, you had a whole big rack of outboard gear, you had a locker of microphones, and you had a staff of engineers and techs. It was a real, completely running business.
Nowadays, it’s moved so much toward individually owned businesses, whether it’s a producer, an artist, a celebrity, or an athlete. The recording studio has become the glorified man cave for people who are into music, and they want to make their own music. It used to be you had to have a million dollars to have a studio.
Nowadays, we’re doing studios in the $50,000 to $100,000 range where people are able to make records that compete with other stuff that they’re hearing out there on the media sources. So it’s no longer price-prohibitive. It’s more a question of, when you’re going to go spend $100,000 to build a recording studio, how is it going to be designed to fully meet what you’re doing in there?
Like Dave said, it’s not like a hotel where you cater to everybody. You can handle a string session in the morning, a rapper in the afternoon, a heavy metal band in the evening. When you have your own personal studio, a lot of times you’re going to be working with one artist for a couple weeks at a time. It’s how you’re able to work within that room, stay within that room for a long period of time, feel comfortable, feel motivated, feel energized to keep on coming up with good material, and not feel like, gee, I’ve got to go back into that dingy room again.
So we’re all about creating that inspirational space for people to be able to create.
Rob Stott: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s fantastic. Well, gentlemen, this was a lot of fun to be able to dive into and learn about the business you’ve built, the portfolio there, PAD Group, and everything along the way. We appreciate the time and definitely look forward to catching up down the line.
Dave Malekpour: We really appreciate being part of your world, the connected devices, and this whole podcast is super cool. I would just add that we have an open line of communication, both to your world, but also to clients that need help. Anybody can just get on our website, proaudiodesign.com or augspurger.com or malekpourdesignpartners.com. Reach out through the info at and just ask a question, and a human being will respond to you.
While we use AI in our processes, we keep it out of the personal relationship side. We’re not pounding people with AI bots and things like that. We love human interaction. I think that’s one of the other things about the company. If you call here, 99% of the time, a person picks up. The person on the other end has got audio experience, they’re technical, and number one, they care.
That’s one of the underlying things about PAD, and this is something that’s lost in some of today’s business because of the nature of things and technology. But human intelligence, I think, trumps artificial intelligence. Even the best artificial intelligence, if you don’t prompt it by a human, can’t possibly do anything that’s useful. So we love to have that human interaction and care.
Rob Stott: Without a doubt. Yeah.
Dave Malekpour: The underlying element of every single person that I’ve chosen to work with us is personal care for others. It’s something that I think brings value to the customers and the projects and their teams and ours. Just having a great time doing what we do, and at the end of the day, this is about making music and making music better.
We’re very lucky and blessed to have this industry that we get to serve, and artists that we look up to as clients, and people like you that we get to connect with and make these incredible human connections that make us all feel more special every day.
Rob Stott: Awesome. We appreciate it and, like I said, look forward to continuing to highlight your story.
Dave Malekpour: Thanks so much, man. Anything I can do, let me know. If there’s any clarity or anything you need, you can always tell me.
