Hello All,
The start of my involvement in audio came at a very early age, I was 10 or 11 when I was at a concert with my parents. The recording engineer let me put the headphones on to listen to the playback of the first half of the show. The recorder was a Nakamichi 1000 cassette deck - I was hooked. My parents are non professional musicians and were very active in the musical community in Bombay so I basically grew up at musical events. I realized very early on that I did not have the same level of musical talend as those around me and so i gravitated towards the live audio and recording of events. I took apart my family radio console (full of alnico Isophon drivers) and built my own speakers at age 13-14. They had the tweeter set back on the top of the bafffle for time alighment with the midrange, i even had a pair of wingnuts and a brace to move the tweeter module!
Anyway, I moved to the US in 1986 and started college, got disgusted, and spent a year at the institute of audio research in greenwich village nyc learning how to become a recording engineer. It was during this time that i spent a lot (way too much) time at the Bottom Line and Lone Star Roadhouse doing FOH and monitors for basically no pay. I also went back to school for an undergraduate degree in Physics and became the chief engineer at the FM station. I can recall doing a live broadcast with a very young lady who played the fiddle and sang a little, she has made quite a name for herself since those days. The band was called Union Station and the young lady was Allison Krauss!
It was during this time that I began doing the mixing for a lot of live events around NYC for FM stations like WNEW and WQCD (CD-101.9). I subsequently worked at CD-101.9 while finishing up post work.
I ended up mixing acts like Pat Metheny, George Benson, Fourplay, Sade etc for broadcast. Somewhere there are DAT's of these floating around.
I always built gear, it was mostly solidstate and some of it was pretty good. I built a Phono preamp using Deane Jensens dual servo circuit and 990 op amps that sounded really good. Until one day, i got my hands on a Dynaco PAS 3 and with all its faults, i realized that a simple circuit with a limited number of gain stages had quite an advantage as far as the ability to emotionally connect. I built a simple 12AX7 phono pre and cloned the output section of an LA2A compressor as the line driver. I refined the phono corcuits and line driver circuits to include the 12AT7 as output amplifier and created a hybrid follower in the line driver section
The first order i got was Larry Marcus who came over to buy a preamp I was selling. He asked me what I would listen to and i showed him the gray hammond box that had tubes sticking out of it at slightly odd angles. He asked if he could listen to it and a couple of minutes later asked me what it would cost if I were to build him one and if he could borrow mine in the meantime!! Since those days, Larry has become a great friend and invaluable to Doshi Audio for his ears along with sales and business experience. He also brings great wine to RMAF !!
This was followed by a few units for other friends in the NY/NJ audiophile community and all of a sudden i started getting emails from all over (i got one from Korea, which blew my mind). I decided that at whatever scale i did this, it had to have a business structure and insurance etc. Doshi Audio was born. with the first product being the full function preamplifier. This was followed by a line stage and then through work with Brian Sowter, we came up with the 31 position volume control transformer. Later evolutions of the products included the balanced MC section with transformer coupling to the MM section, the 90W monoblocks, the 160W monoblocks and Tape stage.
All along, the philosophy has been to use as few gain stages as possible, to use parts conservatively so that the music lover has a tool with which to enjoy music for a long time. It has never been about the latest/greatest whatever. We realize that there many paths to get to one place and that is why we have the "Dogma Free Zone" poster. We try to live that philosophy every day
I hope to use this space to keep in touch, advise and help so feel free to participate
The start of my involvement in audio came at a very early age, I was 10 or 11 when I was at a concert with my parents. The recording engineer let me put the headphones on to listen to the playback of the first half of the show. The recorder was a Nakamichi 1000 cassette deck - I was hooked. My parents are non professional musicians and were very active in the musical community in Bombay so I basically grew up at musical events. I realized very early on that I did not have the same level of musical talend as those around me and so i gravitated towards the live audio and recording of events. I took apart my family radio console (full of alnico Isophon drivers) and built my own speakers at age 13-14. They had the tweeter set back on the top of the bafffle for time alighment with the midrange, i even had a pair of wingnuts and a brace to move the tweeter module!
Anyway, I moved to the US in 1986 and started college, got disgusted, and spent a year at the institute of audio research in greenwich village nyc learning how to become a recording engineer. It was during this time that i spent a lot (way too much) time at the Bottom Line and Lone Star Roadhouse doing FOH and monitors for basically no pay. I also went back to school for an undergraduate degree in Physics and became the chief engineer at the FM station. I can recall doing a live broadcast with a very young lady who played the fiddle and sang a little, she has made quite a name for herself since those days. The band was called Union Station and the young lady was Allison Krauss!
It was during this time that I began doing the mixing for a lot of live events around NYC for FM stations like WNEW and WQCD (CD-101.9). I subsequently worked at CD-101.9 while finishing up post work.
I ended up mixing acts like Pat Metheny, George Benson, Fourplay, Sade etc for broadcast. Somewhere there are DAT's of these floating around.
I always built gear, it was mostly solidstate and some of it was pretty good. I built a Phono preamp using Deane Jensens dual servo circuit and 990 op amps that sounded really good. Until one day, i got my hands on a Dynaco PAS 3 and with all its faults, i realized that a simple circuit with a limited number of gain stages had quite an advantage as far as the ability to emotionally connect. I built a simple 12AX7 phono pre and cloned the output section of an LA2A compressor as the line driver. I refined the phono corcuits and line driver circuits to include the 12AT7 as output amplifier and created a hybrid follower in the line driver section
The first order i got was Larry Marcus who came over to buy a preamp I was selling. He asked me what I would listen to and i showed him the gray hammond box that had tubes sticking out of it at slightly odd angles. He asked if he could listen to it and a couple of minutes later asked me what it would cost if I were to build him one and if he could borrow mine in the meantime!! Since those days, Larry has become a great friend and invaluable to Doshi Audio for his ears along with sales and business experience. He also brings great wine to RMAF !!
This was followed by a few units for other friends in the NY/NJ audiophile community and all of a sudden i started getting emails from all over (i got one from Korea, which blew my mind). I decided that at whatever scale i did this, it had to have a business structure and insurance etc. Doshi Audio was born. with the first product being the full function preamplifier. This was followed by a line stage and then through work with Brian Sowter, we came up with the 31 position volume control transformer. Later evolutions of the products included the balanced MC section with transformer coupling to the MM section, the 90W monoblocks, the 160W monoblocks and Tape stage.
All along, the philosophy has been to use as few gain stages as possible, to use parts conservatively so that the music lover has a tool with which to enjoy music for a long time. It has never been about the latest/greatest whatever. We realize that there many paths to get to one place and that is why we have the "Dogma Free Zone" poster. We try to live that philosophy every day
I hope to use this space to keep in touch, advise and help so feel free to participate
