Interviews

Billy Corgan is a busy man. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman has a schedule that would exhaust artists half his age. (He's 59.) Right now the guitarist/vocalist is guiding Smashing Pumpkins on "The Rats in a Cage Tour," in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the alt-rock giants' biggest release, 1995's 5× Platinum, double-album epic Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

In audio as in life, there are moments when you find your people and, if you're lucky, discover something about yourself. For me, one of these happy junctures took place in the mid-1990s when I came across an issue of Sound Practices.

Over the past 40 years, R.E.M.'s 1983 full-length debut, Murmur, has come to seem ever more timeless. "There's something very special about that record that you can't put into words exactly," mused Don Dixon, who coproduced Murmur and its follow-up, Reckoning, in a recent interview.

A conversation with Magico founder Alon Wolf can feel like stepping onto a moving walkway; it's best to find your balance early. Over the course of a spirited five-hour conversation at the company's impressive production facility in Hayward, California, Wolf questioned my choice of gear. Twice.

Since founding Ojas in the 1990s and applying the name to his audio components, Devon Turnbull has mined a young audience that the traditional hi-fi industry has struggled to reach. Those who know about him receive his speakers, amplifiers, and turntables as if they were gifts delivered from on high.

Most audio engineers split hairs. Eelco Grimm splits microseconds. His expertise in high-precision audio laid the groundwork for Grimm Audio, the Dutch venture he cofounded in 2004 with fellow electrical engineer Guido Tent. The company's master clocks and DACs, developed for both the pro audio and home hi-fi markets, combat tiny timing errors and jitter that can blight digital audio.

Does anyone use the term "record man" these days? In an earlier era, it would have been used in the same way the term "ad man" was used, as a particularly American job description. People who spend their careers in and around the music business. Some of these record men are known by the public—some of it anyway—whereas others may be familiar only to colleagues.

I met Steve Berkowitz under the best of circumstances: sitting in a basement listening room hearing beautiful recordings made in 1958 that I'd never heard before, by the Miles Davis Quintet. It was the recently issued Miles Davis—Birth of the Blue (Analogue Productions APJ 172). The album was, the credits state, "Supervised by Steve Berkowitz." The name rang a bell, though prior to this meeting, I didn't have a face to go with the name.