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In the microphone world, few names are as widely known as Royer. Most readers probably know microphone designer David Royer as the architect of world-class ribbon mics like the Royer R-121, R-122, and R-10; but he’s also the founder and brains behind Mojave Audio, maker of reimagined classic condenser mics.
Royer’s genius lies in his pragmatic approach to microphone design, uncompromising devotion to quality, and constant desire to improve the tools we use to make music.
In this installment of VK Icons, we spoke with David Royer about his early history as an electronic tinkerer and Navy sonar tech, the founding of Royer Labs and Mojave Audio, and his process for optimizing less-than-perfect microphone designs. Royer was joined by Dusty Wakeman, the President of Mojave Audio, former owner of Mad Dog Studios, and a longtime friend of David’s.
How did you become interested in electronics and when did you decide to start a microphone company?
David Royer: I had been a tinkerer since I was a teenager and I had some background in electronics. I had built audio equipment previously, but there were too many gaps in my knowledge to really be able to make a go of it. I tried my hand at starting a microphone company when I was in my twenties, but I chose a really bad time to do it.
I started Mojave in 1986 or ‘87, which was just about the time that quite a few studios were suddenly in serious financial trouble. Studios were going bankrupt right, left, and sideways, and the market was beginning to see a glut of microphones because of studios liquidating them. I was blissfully unaware of what was happening, and it started just as I was beginning to get a viable product together. I was coming up with my first professionally satisfactory microphone but the bottom fell out of the market just as I was ready to go into production. So I felt like I didn’t have a viable business at the time and opted to join the Navy.
What was that first microphone design?
D.R.: Interesting you'd ask. It was a little small-diaphragm tube condenser microphone, and I ended up recycling that design with the Mojave MA-100. So basically, the MA-100 is a microphone I designed when I was in my twenties.
After your service in the Navy, how did you end up getting back into the microphone game?
D.R.: When I got out of the Navy, I more or less picked up where I had left off. I was briefly involved with a company called DVA back in 1996, but from the end of 1996 until 1998, I was doing business as Mojave Audio again. One of the things I decided to do was to cook up a ribbon microphone to be at the bottom of my product line, and that microphone morphed into the Royer R-121.
When did ribbon mics become a major focus for you, and how did that lead to the transition from Mojave Audio to Royer Labs?
D.R.: I had a salvaged RCA ribbon microphone way back in the ‘70s; but when the ribbon got trashed, I was flat-footed, and it wasn't until 1993 that I stuck my foot back into the ribbon microphone pond again. A friend of mine had an old Reslo ribbon microphone that was inoperable, and I had been in correspondence with Bob Speiden—the maker of the Speiden stereo ribbon microphone—and he helped me build up the courage to try re-ribboning that Reslo mic.
In the ‘90s, I was re-ribboning mostly RCA microphones, and then things kind of went from there, and the co-founders of Royer Labs wanted that name rather than Mojave Audio.
What do you like about ribbons, compared to other types of microphones?
D.R.: First and foremost, a ribbon microphone is a pretty straightforward thing. You're not defying the laws of physics to make it work. But there are two things that I really like about ribbon microphones, and the first of those is that a ribbon microphone is electromagnetic. You're generating the audio signal in a really low-impedance circuit, so you don't have to worry about moisture short-circuiting your audio signal to ground, which is a colossal pain in the neck with condenser mics.
The other thing that I really like about ribbon microphones is they produce a bi-directional polar pattern all by themselves. The simplest form of ribbon microphone is bi-directional, and if a bi-directional microphone is what you want, a simple ribbon microphone is the shortest path from A to B.
And I’ll add another thing that is nice about ribbons: their frequency response is far from perfect, but in some cases, you can use that to your advantage. Typically, the response starts falling off above 10 kHz, so if you've got a program source that tends to sound scratchy or screechy, a ribbon microphone will gloss that over for you.
After almost a decade of success with Royer Labs, you decided to revive Mojave Audio as a separate company in the early aughts. What’s the story behind that?
D.R.: I wrote an article for Tape Op magazine in the fall of 2001 that basically got all of this moving. Back then, MXL was selling the MXL 2001 large-diaphragm condenser—kind of a Neumann clone—and it was nothing special. The capsules in those microphones were not bad at all, but they were being sabotaged with very mediocre electronics.
I found right away that that microphone was a diamond in the rough, so I bought one and tube-ified it, then I wrote an article for Tape Op about how to make your own tube condenser microphone. I started Mojave Audio again to sell those kits, and it took on a life of its own, so we decided to stop selling the kits on a onesie-twosie basis out the back door and actually sell a Mojave microphone.
Dusty, when did you come into the picture and join Mojave?
Dusty Wakeman: I discovered Royer ribbon mics in the early 2000s when I still had Mad Dog Studios. We were all in Burbank, so I got to be friends with them and ended up being an endorser, and they would bring mics over to test out. That went on for about a five-year period, and I formed a close personal relationship with those guys.
John Jennings, who's now the President of Royer but back then was the V.P. of Sales and Marketing, brought over a prototype of the MA-200. Eddie Kramer was working in my studio with my Neumann U 67s up as drum room mics, and he said, “Well, toss it out there, and let's listen to it.” The three of us were sitting in the control room and I was like, “Wow. You tell me which one of these isn't a U 67.”
I talked to John, and he said, “We're starting a new thing to produce these. It's not going to be Royer; we're going to resurrect the Mojave name.” At that point, I'd been making records nonstop for 25 years and my second kid was on her way. It was 2005 and the record industry had kind of fallen off a cliff, so I was looking around for something else to do. I just said, “Hey, if you need any help with this, let me know.” And they're like, “Well, we're looking for somebody to run the company.” That was in January of 2005, and in September, I started full-time at Mojave.
What were those early years like, and how did the company evolve into what it is today?
D.W.: We started with one microphone, the MA-200, which traces back to one of David's designs when he was making them in his garage. Same with the MA-100. They go back to his original designs; just better versions of them. We pretty much came out with one microphone a year for a long time because we were a very small company.
A lot of the mics came from me saying, “Hey, David; we need a multi-pattern, solid-state mic,” and it would be that simple. David's already got a notebook full of designs, so he would dig in his notes and find something he designed a while back and develop it from there.
Most of our mics—not all of them—are inspired by the classics, but they're David's modern take on them. We don't make clones like so many other people do, we just take that concept and say, “What's the best version of that we can build today, with today's parts?” That's how the design process has worked over the years.
David, what inspires you to keep coming up with new designs and ways of perfecting existing designs?
D.R.: Curiosity. I keep my ears open, and if I see a bad idea, my first question is, “Where did this guy goof up?” If I see an idea that has potential, I'll say, “Okay, what did they do wrong that is correctable?” The chapter-and-verse example would be the MXL 2001.
Every now and again, I'll go and cook something up and it will end up taking on a life of its own—witness the MA-37, which started as a DIY project that I was considering sharing. Basically, what I did was take a pair of cheap microphones, and I thought, “Okay, the simplest tube microphone known to man is the Sony C-37A. I'll play around with revisiting the C-37A with a capsule and a tube that you can buy at your local electronic store, and we'll go from there.”
So the prototype that led to the MA-37 started out as a modified cheap microphone, and the performance of that prototype was good enough that it seemed reasonable to go to the next level: namely, finding a capsule based on the Sony design rather than a Neumann or AKG design and then refining the electronics to match the performance of the Sony C-37A.
That mic is renowned for having headroom to spare, which came about due to design choices that were made to deal with size and parts availability considerations, and I was careful to design the MA-37 to at least match the capabilities of the original.
How has your approach to microphone design changed over the years?
D.R.: That's not an easy question to answer. At the end of the day, anybody who's building microphones wants to build microphones that people will buy.
If you make something that's too fancy and the price is too high, only a very small minority of prospective microphone buyers will buy them, so I’m always aware of the economic side of things and I try to avoid needless expenditures. It depends on the price point, too. With a microphone like the Royer R-10 or Mojave MA-50, keeping the cost down is critical, but I'm less concerned about that with the higher-end mics in both lines.
Whenever I'm at a trade show and I see raw microphone elements or audio transformers, I'll chat with whoever is selling them. In the back of my mind, I'll be thinking, “If I buy these and take them home with me and decide to cook something up with them, what am I going to end up with?”
So, what are you and Dusty cooking up these days? Any exciting products that you want to talk about?
D.W.: I've got several products that are “shovel-ready.” One is bringing back the MA-100. We don't currently make that, but we want to bring it back, and this time it'll have a swivel head. It’s the world's greatest snare mic ever made, so we're going to put a swivel head on it.
We also recently released the MA-D, our dynamic mic, which has been a great success. I had been bugging David for years that we need a dynamic microphone, and he's like, “Why do we need a dynamic microphone?” He hated the presence peak that all the SM58s of the world had.
On our YouTube channel, David talks about how 60 or 70 years ago, you wanted that presence peak for intelligibility because PAs were terrible. But nowadays, PAs are like studio monitors, so you don’t need that.
We call the MA-D the “smooth alternative” because it doesn't have that big honking midrange peak. It took years for us to find a cartridge to use that was flat, but once we finally found one, that was kind of the key to unlocking it. I've got a wireless capsule for it ready to go, so next time we build MA-Ds, we'll build some of those and start publicizing it.
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