Eventide, Inc

Eventide, Inc.

Company type	Corporation
Founded	1971
Headquarters	Little Ferry, New Jersey
Key people	Richard Factor, Co-founder and Chairman Orville Greene, Co-founder Steve Katz, Co-founder Robert Kovarcik, Director of Operations Anthony Agnello, President, Audio Division Richard VanTieghem, President, Communications Division
Products	Pro Audio, Communications, and Avionics equipment and software
Website	www.eventide.com

Evintide BD600 Broadcast Delay

Eventide is an audio & broadcast, communications, and avionics company in the United States whose audio division manufactures digital audio processors and DSP software, and guitar effects. Eventide was one of the first companies to manufacture digital audio processors, and its products are mainstays in Sound recording and reproduction, post production, and broadcast studios.

Beginnings

Eventide was founded by recording engineer Stephen Katz, inventor Richard Factor, and businessman/patent attorney Orville Greene. The business was founded in the basement of the Sound Exchange, a recording studio located at 265 West 54th Street in New York and owned by Greene. When Katz needed to rewind the analog tape back to a specific point on their Ampex MM1000 multitrack recorder, but limited space in the studio did not allow for a "tape op" device. Katz asked Factor to build a gadget that would do the job, and the resulting device turned into an Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) success for Ampex. Other early products included a two-second delay for telephone research and an electrostatic deflector for dispensing nanoliter quantities of chemical reagents.

Eventide's original product line consisted of two products: the Instant Phaser (the result of an AES Show appearance) and what would become the 1745 Digital Delay Line (the result of a significant order from Maryland Public Broadcasting).

Beginning with the 1745M, Eventide began widely using Random-access memory (RAM) chips in many of their products. After purchasing a Hewlett-Packard computer for researching reverb algorithms and needing to upgrade the memory in order for the computer to handle the necessary complex computations, Eventide designers realized that they could manufacture computer memory expansion far more affordably than the current market price. So Eventide began to manufacture and sell HP-compatible RAM expansion boards, and did so from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s.

Aviation

Shortly after Eventide moved its offices from Manhattan to New Jersey, its President earned a private airplane pilot's license. Surprised that moving map displays were not available for small airplanes, he had Eventide develop Argus, the first moving map system and one of the first multi-function displays designed for general aviation use.

Digital Logging

In the early 1990s, Eventide developed digital logging machines that enabled broadcasters to begin archiving digitally with improved audio quality and far greater storage capabilities (via DAT and later DVD-RAM) than they previously had been working with.

H910 Harmonizer

The Eventide H910 Harmonizer, was first demonstrated to universally positive reactions at the AES show in late 1974. It was designed by Eventide's first engineer, Tony Agnello (who went on to become the president of Eventide's audio division). The pre-production prototype was a hand-wired box topped with a music keyboard controller. Jon Anderson of the band Yes was among those impressed, and he became a tester for the first prototype. The production H910 was released in 1975, offering pitch shifting (±1 octave), delay (up to 112.5 ms), feedback regeneration and other features in an easy-to-use box that sold for $1,600. The H910 was named after a Beatles tune (the model number refers to the "One After 909").

The first H910 customer was New York City's Channel 5, utilizing it to downward pitch shift I Love Lucy reruns that were sped up to create room to run more commercials. Speeding up the reruns had increased the pitch of the audio, and the H910 was able to shift that pitch back to where it originally had been. Frank Zappa added it to his guitar processing rig. Producer Tony Visconti used the H910 to create the snare sound on David Bowie's song "Young Americans", as did Tony Platt on AC/DC's song "Back in Black". Another popular application was to use two H910s, slightly detuned with a small delay. Notable users of this twin Harmonizer effect included Eddie Van Halen, who used it for his trademark guitar sound, and Tom Lord-Alge, who used it for the vocals on the hit Steve Winwood song "Back in the High Life Again". Recognizing the popularity of this application, Eventide later recreated it as the "Dual 910" program in the H3000 UltraHarmonizer released in the late 1980s.

The H910 Harmonizer was recognized by the AES with a TECnology Hall of Fame award in 2007, and on November 10, 1976, Eventide filed a trademark registration for "Harmonizer," and Eventide continues to maintain its rights to the Harmonizer trademark today.

Timeline of noteworthy products

• 1745 Digital Delay Line - 2-channels of independent delay from a single input, with the delays ranging from 0 to 200 milliseconds.
• 1745A Digital Delay Line - Modification of 1745 DDL with easier, more user-friendly shift registers.
• 1745M - Another variant of the original 1745M, this version was one of the first uses of Random Access Memory (RAM) in an audio product, and also had an optional pitch change module, one of the first products of this kind with a frequency response suitable for music.
• H910 Harmonizer® (1975) - First commercially available pitch changer.
• H949 Harmonizer® - Harmonizer with finely controllable pitch change capability, used for "doubling" vocals, and "deglitch" option for greatly reducing objectionable artifacts in harmonized audio.
• BD955 (1975) - "Obscenity Delay" allowed broadcasters sufficient delay to delete any objectionable content (like from a live telephone caller on a radio show) with no apparent interruption to the program
• SP2016 - Early Digital Reverb processor utilizing DSP and first effects device to publish its SDK so that 3rd party developers could develop "plug-in" algorithms
• Instant Phaser™ - The first phaser
• Instant Flanger™ - One of the first flangers
• H3000 (1986) - First intelligent/diatonic pitch shifting.
• DSP4000 - User-programmable algorithms with large toolkit of DSP functions, some very low-level, similar in concept to later software-based products such as Cycling 74's Max/MSP and Native Instruments' Reaktor
• DSP4500 Ultra-Harmonizer (1998)
• DSP7000 / DSP7500 (2001) - Pitch shifter / effects processor with four times more processing power than the DSP4000
• Orville - Pitch shifter / effects processor with eight times more processing power than the DSP7000 / DSP7500 processors
• Eclipse (2002)
• Clockworks Legacy (2003) - Software plug-in versions of classic Eventide effects and DSP
• BD500 (2004) - 40-second version of Eventide's fourth-generation broadcast profanity delay
• Anthology TDM Bundle (2005)
• H8000FW (2005)
• Stompbox Line (2007)

External links

• Eventide Audio Division Website
• Eventide Communications Division Website
• Eventide Avionics Division Website
• Eventide YouTube channel
• Eventide Facebook page
• Eventide Twitter page

See Also

• Pitch shift
• Broadcast delay
• Delay (audio effect)