When you’re listening to guitar heroes like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck live in concert, the guitar sound you hear isn’t coming from the amplifiers on stage. Those amps mostly provide the stage sound for the musicians.
What the audience hears is the guitar amplified through the PA system.
Critical to getting Clapton’s guitar signal from stage to the soundboard to the speakers without losing sound quality are electronic components like DI (direct input) boxes, signal splitters and instrument switches. And one of the undisputed leaders in that space is Port Coquitlam-headquartered Radial Engineering.
When Steve Vai joined the Experience Hendrix tour in May, he used a Radial switch called Switchbone to toggle between two different amps he used on stage.
“Jeff Beck, Santana, Clapton, Steve Vai, [Joe] Satriani – all these guys are using our [components] to take the guitar signal and distribute it around to other amplifiers,” said Radial Engineering founder and CEO Peter Janis.
Operating out of a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Port Coquitlam, Radial employs a staff of 50, who make a wide range of music equipment and components.
In addition to Radial DI boxes, switches, splitters and re-amps, the company makes an array of guitar distortion and effects pedals through its Tonebone division. Randy Bachman and Daryl Stuermer (Genesis, Phil Collins) use Radial tube distortion pedals, and James Taylor and Marty Stewart use Radial acoustic guitar preamps. In January, Radial will launch a new product – a DI box optimized for multiple guitars onstage.
A third – and rapidly growing – division of Radial Engineering is Primacoustic, which makes sound deadening for recording studios and auditoriums. Primacoustic provided the acoustic materials for CTV and NBC in the international broadcast centre during the 2010 Winter Olympics,
“We did Electronic Arts, we did Tommy Lee’s studio, we’ve done churches of all sizes,” Janis added.
But Radial’s DI boxes and switches are the company’s bread and butter. While the number of competitors making guitar effects pedals is legion, Janis said his company has few rivals when it comes to the DI boxes and switches.
Tom Lee Music vice-president Graham Blank agrees. Tom Lee carries a variety of Radial Engineering components and cables as well as Tonebone pedals.
“Any of their products is just exceptional audio quality,” he said. “Many companies have been focused on the race to the bottom – getting the cheapest product at the minimum quality. And [Janis is] an absolute fanatic for audio quality.”
Originally from Quebec, Janis is a musician who managed to turn frustration into profit when, in the early 1980s, he realized there was a need for a device that would allow guitar players to switch seamlessly between amplifiers to achieve different sounds.
“I had three guitar amps onstage and switching between amps just wasn’t done,” he said. “But I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn’t make it happen, so we started to build things.”
Disco came along, the first in a series of blows that helped kill Canada’s once thriving live music scene, and Janis was forced to get a job. He ended up working in a music store and making his own electronics. He then worked for Fender as product director for the Canadian market before launching his own company in 1992. Radial is now approaching a couple of important milestones.
“We’re going to be breaking $10 million in sales this year,” Janis said. “So it’s coming up to a milestone – not only 20 years in business, but $10 million in sales.”
Radial outsources many of the components that go into its products, but does all the design, assembly and testing at its Port Coquitlam manufacturing plant. Janis said the company – which had $8.2 million in sales last year – was virtually untouched by the recession.
“The bulk of our business is the professional entertaining industry, which is kind of cool because it’s somewhat of a recession-proof industry,” Janis said. “When things are down, U2 doesn’t say the economy’s down [so] we’re not going to take a drummer.
“We shipped over 50,000 electronic products last year. We’re currently up this year 20% [in gross sales revenue. Last year we were up 15%, the year before we were up 5% while the rest of the economy was way down.”