A Trip to DiMarzio's Factory
I love factories, studios, power plants, you name it -- any
place where people get stuff done. I love learning arcane terms and seeing specialized
tools and watching anybody good accomplish something special. (I once pulled off a highway
and watched a crew of top-notch explosives technicians blasting shaped charges into solid
bedrock for hours -- simply because the guy operating the steam-shovel was so good he
could have unhooked a brassiere with its backhoe. But I digress.)
So when Larry DiMarzio made one of his annual pilgrimages
back East (he lives in Montana these days, raising dental floss or something), I
practically begged him to let me visit DiMarzio's
Staten Island factory. After all, I live at the base of the Verrazano Bridge, I might as
well get on it every now and then.
Larry agreed, finding my excitement amusing. As I started
out the door to meet him, it occurred to me that my downstairs neighbor Neville (also a
Telecaster owner) might enjoy seeing the place. "Hey Larry, can I bring my friend
Neville?" I blurted.
"Sure, what's he do?"
"He's a professional photographer." (And a darn
good one -- check out his Website: www.nevilleelder.com.)
"No cameras allowed!" Larry exclaimed.
Neville came anyway -- wouldn't you?
The DiMarzio factory is a low-slung converted warehouse in
a mixed-zone neighborhood. Out front, it's surrounded by boatyards and houses, out back is
a small garage devoted to restoring classic cars -- not some fantasy garage out of the Griot's
catalog, but the kind where the owner still wears overalls and has cracked knuckles that
haven't had skin on them since he graduated from high school.
The front offices are neat and organized. The first thing I
saw upon entering was file cabinet after file cabinet. "You guys file stuff?" I
asked Larry. "How rock'n'roll is that?"
The fact is that DiMarzio, like any successful
multinational business, is very serious about being in business. Of course they
file things. They work regular hours, and they keep the manufacturing area neat and tidy,
and they make thousands of guitar pickups. Many thousands.
Perhaps I should back up a bit. Larry DiMarzio, many years
ago, was a guitarist and a guitar technician. Dissatisfied with the quality and sound of
the pickups the major guitar companies were making in the early-to-mid '70s, Larry began
taking vintage guitar pickups apart and reconstructing them, looking for ways to increase
signal, reduce noise, and create tone -- the lifeblood and working capital of the
professional guitarist.
Guitar pickups work through the principle of magnetic
induction. A typical single-coil guitar pickup is composed of a set of six pole-pieces
(one under each string), which are small electromagnets wrapped with coiled wire. Each
magnet generates a field around itself, which the string moves through when it is struck
or plucked. That causes the string, which is ferrous, to oscillate and those oscillations
move the ferrous string rapidly back and forth through the magnetic field, which changes
the pole-piece's magnetic flux, creating current (Farraday's Law) in the wires wrapped
around the magnets. That current is amplified in the amplifier and drives the speaker,
creating what my mother always referred to as "all that racket."
In a manner of speaking, it's the opposite from the way a
speaker works. In a speaker, the current causes changes in the voice coil's flux, which
interacts with the magnetic field of a permanent magnet, causing the coil to move back and
forth. Since the coil is attached to the speaker cone, the cone vibrates producing sound.
(So does that make an electric guitar playing through an amplified speaker the electrical
equivalent of a palindrome?)
Keep in mind that I'm simplifying a lot of things here.
Don't write me and tell me I forgot to discuss Lenz's law or single coil as opposed to
humbucking pickups or early pickups constructed from a single magnet. Speaker design and
pickup design are complex subjects and I'm just trying to generalize here.
Getting back to Larry: Around the mid-'70s people began
asking DiMarzio to work on their pickups. After a while, they began asking him to build
them pickups. And eventually, it occurred to Larry that maybe he could sell a lot
of pickups if he could make 'em faster without sacrificing quality -- which is the whole
problem the major guitar manufacturers had neglected to deal with in the first place.
Then, guys like Al DiMeola, Rick Derringer, Earl Slick, and
Ace Freely added DiMarzios to their rigs and Larry went from Larry Who? to a man
who couldn't make enough pickups running full-bore 24/7. Things have calmed down a lot
since those heady days, but only because the Dimarzio factory now employs about 40 to 50
people.
Walking through the factory floor, we found people winding
coils with automated winders Larry designed himself, potting coils, checking output specs,
assembling accessories, and, constantly, shipping products out. The company now produces
about 300 models of pickup and they range from individual pickups packed in nifty plastic
boxes which are sold directly to consumers at guitar shops to industrial flats containing
a gross or so, which were on their way to factories like Fender, Ibanez, Parker, B.C Rich,
Epiphone, MusicMan, and Zion guitars, among others.
I'd love to describe all the construction techniques we
observed, but Larry won't let me -- for the same reason he didn't let Neville bring his
cameras. "Oh, we have a whole bunch of pickups which have something quite unusual --
a patent," Larry explained. "But eventually it occurred to me that a patent is
only effective if you spend your life suing people to preserve its integrity. So these
days, I just say everything's a secret and when I go to NAMM (National Association of
Music Merchants) conventions, I just sit on a stool and growl at my competitors, while an
employee begs them,'Oh please, don't upset him -- he's crazy, God only knows what he'll
do!' It works about as well and it’s a lot less effort."
As regular readers will know, DiMarzio now also makes audio
cables.
Actually, Larry doesn't hide too much about his cables --
it’s the pickups he feels proprietary about. In the course of building those pickups
over the years, Larry's used a few thousand miles of wire of one sort or another. You
might even say his whole career has been based on the ways signals behave in wire. So
Larry isn't very mystical about the way wires work -- he's pretty matter-of-fact about it.
In essence, Larry sums up what he knows by saying, "If all it took to figure this
stuff out was a formula, I wouldn't even have a business. I got started because Fender and
Gibson decided that as long as their pickups conducted signal, everything else was detail.
I've designed what I believed to be theoretically perfect cables and they sounded horrible.
At other times I've adjusted seemingly insignificant details -- such as the way the same
number of strands are bundled together -- and it has made a huge difference.
Obviously a cable carrying musical signal is not acting as simply as an RLC network, but
that's really about all I do know.
"My work has made me a 'real-world application'
hardliner. If I design a pickup, the only way to find out if it works is to play a gig
with it. If it doesn't sound good, I don't care how much better it should be
theoretically. I find experience more useful than the explanation."
 One thing Larry has experienced
is the difference a good termination makes. He doesn't mean simply what kind of RCA or
spade lug is used, although that makes a difference too, of course. He's talking about the
way the wire is attached to that termination -- he's talking about the weld. In
Larry's estimation, nothing works better than fusing the discrete metal wires into a fused
solid at the termination points -- and an ultrasonic welding machine is precisely the
right critter for that operation, he reckons.
"We tested different types of termination and
discovered that they're responsible for remarkably audible differences. We found we needed
to create a solid portion at the end of the cable that incorporates all of the
strands, and through listening tests we settled on ultrasonic welding -- which should
create a difference in the wire's resistance. But I don't think resistance is the issue so
much as aligning the signal precisely at the beginning and the end of a cable seems to be.
I have no idea why this should be true, but we've observed it repeatedly."
Larry introduced Neville and me to Louis Butera, who was
kind enough to prepare some wire samples for us and demonstrate the ultrasonic welding
apparatus. The prep work -- and finding hearing protection for Neville and myself -- took
longer than the actual welding process. Nevertheless, it was pretty impressive to insert
stranded wire and remove a fused mass of solid metal. And the hearing protection really
sobered us up; it's good to remember you're dealing with soundwaves powerful enough to fuse
metal, after all. Imagine what they could do to your tympanic membrane!
After the tour, Neville and I joined Larry and Louis in
Louis' office. Oh yeah! That's what I expected a guitar pickup factory to look
like. Leaning against the walls, piled on the floors, stacked on the sofas, were guitars,
partially assembled guitars, guitar parts, amps, a few scattered PA components, a pair of
what looked like AR-3a's serving as speaker stands to a nifty little pair of mini-monitors
(built by Larry, as it so happened), an ancient tubed Scott monaural integrated amp, a CD
player, a huge rack of CDs, and, oh yeah, a desk where Louis actually works.
"Louis, do you have those two cables connected?"
Larry asked.
"Just a minute."
The two mini-monitors were connected to the mono amp's
speaker A and B outputs so we could listen to one at a time. Larry and Louis switched from
one speaker to the other while playing Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool, Jerome
Harris' Rendezvous, and the Tallis Scholars' interpretation of Allegri's Misereri.
Gradually some impressions emerged. The two speakers did
not sound identical. The output was the same and the overall character was remarkably
similar, but one speaker seemed to produce more distinct and far more discrete bass notes
than the other.
There was also a difference in presentation of the upper
mids to high frequencies -- although this was maddeningly hard to fasten onto. It wasn't
so much that one was consistently smoother as that one seemed mildly exciting while the
other seemed unremarkable. That almost makes it sound as though I preferred the one that I
describe as "exciting," but actually the opposite was true. I was pretty sure
"exciting" would translate as irritating in the long run.
Finally, I couldn't take it any more. "What are we
listening to?" I demanded. Larry and Louis looked at one another.
"Actually, it's the same wire and the same weld, we
just used two different spade lugs."
"The lug is the only difference?"
"Absolutely. We used the same setting on the welding
rig and the same wire with the same number of strands and grouped in the same bundles. It
was a mono signal, so you weren't listening to channel differences. It's okay to be
startled -- we're startled at how the tiniest changes make a difference all the
time."
After that, we descended into total guitar geekdom and
gossip. I think I'll end our tour with that ancient bit of audio wisdom: Everything really
does make a difference.
Go figure.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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