Posted October, 2011
I’m not an audiophile but I think I know good sound when I hear it. I also don’t mind investing just a little bit into a set of speakers or amplifier in order to hear my music as perfectly as I can on my meager budget.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated five sets of Bose speakers of different types and configurations and I really do love them. I even have a pair of Bose Q3 headsets that I use while traveling. One of the sets of speakers I use quite often are the Companion 2’s that hang off of my Boomerocity computer. I thought that they were a great speaker with the best sound for the money. They are and they were . . . until a couple of weeks ago.
At that time I was introduced to a little Plug-In that I downloaded to my computer. After a couple of minutes of setup and configuration, I opened up my iTunes library and picked one of my favorite instrumental songs,Cajun Pass, by guitarist, Phil Keaggy.
I was, like, “Wait a minute!”
I toggled the Plug-In on and off, not believing my ears. With the Plug-In on, the sound emitting from my speakers was crisp, clean and clear. When I turned off the tool, my beloved and cherished Companion 2’s seemed to sound like a cheap AM transistor radio by comparison. This little gizmo blew my socks off!
After listening to my music through my newfound set of ears (and after retrieving my socks), I wanted to know more about the story behind this fantastic application.
Oh, yeah. I bet you’re wondering what this miraculous gizmo is called. It’s called the Digital Power Station and it’s the flagship product produced by Bongiovi Acoustics.
Now, if you’re like me and mangle the king’s English, that word before “Acoustics” might seem to be hard to pronounce. However, if you’re into rock and roll, I’ll bet you your next download that you know how to pronounce it. Think “Bon Jovi”.
Ring a bell? The founder and big kahuna of Bongiovi Acoustics is Tony Bongiovi and, yes, he’s related to Jon Bon Jovi (second cousins). However, Tony’s pedigree isn’t based on leveraging family relations. In fact, Tony preceded his cousin in the music business by a few moons.
Mr. Bongiovi story is the stuff of legends and the American dream. Young Tony was interested in the science and mechanics of sound and amplification at an early age. At the age of seventeen, the Raritan, New Jersey teen was experimenting with sound and uncovered the secret to replicating the Motown Sound.
Tony contacted the Detroit-based record label and immediately impressed its brilliant president, Barry Gordy. So much so that the music mogul regularly flew the young Bongiovi back and forth from Jersey to Detroit to engineer records for the likes of Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips and many others on the Motown label.
Tony was eventually wooed away to a little studio a bit closer to home: the legendary Record Plant in New York. The studio implemented his acoustic design talents to work to improve an already great facility. The result was the “Tony Bongiovi sound” and was heard on rock radio in the 60’s. Tony engineered albums there for such talent as Jimi Hendrix, Dr. John, Vanilla Fudge and John McLaughlin.
It didn’t take long for another studio, Media Sound, to hire Bongiovi away where he added artists like The Isley Brothers, Gloria Gaynor, The Ramones and the Talking Heads to his engineering resume.
By 1977, with a resume loaded down with gold record credentials, Mr. Bongiovi designed and started up Power Station Studios. Built within an abandoned Con Edison power generation station, the studio provided rooms designed specifically for multi-track recording that gave recordings a live sound.
Ultimately, Tony’s talents and studios have made significant contributions to over 40 gold and platinum albums for artists as the Scorpions, Ozzy Osborne, Aerosmith, and his cousin’s band, Bon Jovi. He also had a major part in the largest selling disco record in history: Star Wars from the Meco album, Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk.
With this incredible musical history bound up into this one man, even a simpleton like me could see the greatness behind the little Plug-In that I downloaded. I knew that I had to chat with this amazing man and within a couple of days, a phone interview was arranged.
Our conversation started out with Mr. Bongiovi giving me the Reader’s Digest version of the history of the DPS and how long it’s been available.
“It’s been available for a couple of years now. This all started many, many {mprestriction ids="*"}years ago. In 1970, I wrote a paper on this. The idea behind this was to create the ability to have sound played back in a high-noise environment using light-weight playback systems.
“Also, running hand-in-hand with that, it becomes a very cost effective way to bring high quality sound into the hands of everybody. Up until this time, it was only available through expensive components and it wasn’t practical. With the advent of digital technology I was able to make this DPS happen.
“In order to make it work in its analog form, it required lots and lots of equipment and, as you can possibly imagine, the progress of this particular technology falls hand-in-hand with the progress of the cell phone. You can see the original ‘brick’ cell phone and now everything’s on my little iPhone. So, digital technology is what really gave us the ability to make it available to everybody. Now, everybody with the Plug-In or the Bongiovi DPS App iOS can have the same high-quality sound that was only available on exotic equipment just a few years ago.”
Because Tony mentioned that his paper was written back in the analog days, I asked if he actually created analog version of the DPS.
“Oh, yeah! The initial prototypes were analog. First, I had to go into the lab which was part of our studios. We had enough equipment in terms of filters, equalizers and automatic gain control circuits that were all part of this. So I was able to test this theory.
“Then, around the 1980’s, we were able to build - in an analog form - a primitive version of what you have now and it worked. I wasn’t able to do anything with that because it wasn’t practical to either manufacture or market it because the person who would be operating it had to have all sorts of skill levels. Of course, with the DPS, everything is automated so you just plug it in or download it, hit ‘Bongiovi on’ and off it goes.
“So, the first iteration was analog and we built several prototypes. From that, of course, we graduated into the digital domain. That’s, of course, what you have now.”
As technology evolved the component costs dropped to the point where what was once high-end technology was pretty much commoditized and provided the perfect entry point for Bongiovi’s creation to hit the mass market.
“I started to investigate consumer electronics because I wanted to bring to the consumer what we’re used to having in the studio in both film and in music. Of course, having access to a lot of consumer electronics in the past years – those components that you buy at retail that are cost effective in their manufacturing. But it doesn’t mean that they sound good. If you take a look at loudspeakers or even headphones, you realize that that device that reproduces the sound was invented in 1927 and hasn’t changed.
“So, the idea came about, ‘Well, if I can’t change the device – that would be too expensive – I’ll just change the program material to compensate for whatever anomalies exist in the device. In the past few years, there have been all kinds of things available. iHome offers a studio series of playback devices featuring the Bongiovi Digital Power Station technology that are docking stations as well as amplifier systems that are all self-contained.
“So, the size of the playback systems became more available and the cost of the playback systems became more effective. For me, it became a natural progression to say, ‘Now is the time to implement this’ because I have a vehicle that I can put this in which would be consumer electronics and I can make the low-cost consumer electronics sound every bit as good – if not better – than some very exotic, expensive equipment.”
When I shared my story about DPS’s impact on my Bose Companion 2’s, Tony was both complimentary and philosophical regarding the speaker manufacturer.
“The Bose technology is state of the art in terms of the manufacturing of the speaker itself. But speakers are like a little electric motor and there’s a little magnet in there and there’s a coil around a thing called a “former”. That’s hooked up to a piece of paper. Although the materials are more sophisticated – the polymers are better today – it still does the same thing. You have to move a certain amount of air to make that work. I recognized that very early on.
“Bose makes a good mechanical speaker and, for what it is, it’s as good as it can get utilizing – I don’t want to say ‘old technology’ but utilizing speaker technology that hadn’t changed much. Now, they have amplifier that’s sophisticated but, even with that, you still have to deal with the mechanics of that speaker.
“Engineers and companies like t
