Early on

I’ve been interested in electronics since I was a kid. In the 1950’s I had a pretty good collection of old radios, record players, and televisions and I spent countless hours tinkering with them to learn how they worked. This was in an era before any of this stuff was cool. I struggled through high school and went on to higher education at Clarkson College and R.I.T. That didn’t work out, I left school, and for a while I worked at WHAM radio as a “broadcast engineer.” Then I moved on to General Dynamics Corporation, a large defense contractor, which was interesting. There were some really brilliant engineers, some of them great mentors, and we worked on technologies that were way ahead of the time. I got to see the first integrated circuits, both digital and analog, and worked with small computers long before they arrived in the commercial sector.

Brighton Sound

In the late 1960’s I left General Dynamics and began messing with live music and sound. One day I formed a business partnership called Brighton Sound with Duffy Sweeney with the deal that I’d take care of the technology and Duffy would run the business affairs. We would try to become a credible “concert sound company,” a business that was just emerging at the time. I designed and built most of our sound system electronics myself including several mixing boards and a bunch of power amplifiers we called “Loudamps.” Our sound probably wasn’t a great by today’s standards but it certainly held its own then and we provided sound for many major acts like Chuck Mangione, John Sebastian, Bonnie Raitt, Dr. Hook, Leo Kottke, The Kinks, Earth Wind and Fire, Peter Frampton, the list goes on and on.

Ashly Audio

I got more interested in manufacturing and in 1974 I left Brighton Sound and started Ashly with several friends. My vision was that we could build our own small scale manufacturing facility out of common tools and home darkroom equipment, do our early prototyping with the same tools we used for production, and spend very little as a startup. That vision turned out to be correct, the business got serious, and we mass produced a lot of high quality audio gear in several factories. I designed all the original analog gear including the original consoles, Parametric and Graphic Equalizers, Limiter-Compressors, Crossovers, and the Mos-Fet power amplifiers. I retired in September, 2008 and sold Ashly Audio after 34 good years.

Today

Today I’m still messing about with audio gear, I have some very nice hardware, but now there’s a lot of software too. I like making recordings of live music events on multiple tracks, you’ll see some of that under “Services.” You might also find me on Lake Ontario sailing my boat “Flicker” if the wind is right or you might hear me on 75 meter AM amateur radio, call sign KC2RLQ.

Best regards,

–Bill