JOAN OF AUDIO & MUSIC

more often than not, it comes out of something VERY hard that I went through. Sometimes it comes from something beautiful I experienced. Sometimes it starts with me messing around with my MPC and messing with some samples or making a beat with a certain rhythm or vibe I am trying to create. And then I put it into my computer with pro tools where I can add other instruments and then maybe write to it. It’s always kinda different.

(RJ) What is your primary intention or purpose as an artist? And can you name what it is that you are expressing or giving to your audience through your music?

(DS) It is my primary intention to reach the HIGHEST level of self-expression through my music. I feel it so strongly. When everything is in place, like you have put in the hard, diligent work of practicing, done the other self-work like staying grounded and centered, then it allows for this OTHER thing to enter into the music. It’s like riding an indescribable divine wave. And through that, I am able to express the deepest part of my spirit.

(RJ) What are your strengths and weaknesses as a musician? How do you leverage them?

(DS) Strengths: I am a good music teacher, I can read and play pretty much anything so I am versatile, funky, sensitive to other players- whatever situation I am in (meaning I know when not to bring my “ego”. Like when I’m supposed to be playing background dinner music or if I’m working for a band as a side person and I know how to just do my job). I have a lot of musical things I can do like lead a band, compose, arrange, music direction, lead a choir, produce instrumentals, produce demos for people etc.

Weaknesses: To be completely honest sometimes I’m lazy about practicing as much audiokeyreviews.com as I feel I should, I am always at the piano every day whether I am gigging or teaching or learning music for something or recording, but there is a difference between playing, and focused practicing. I (just like probably most other artists and maybe people) sometimes have a little voice in the back of my head sometimes telling me I’m not good enough. And there are other days when I feel like I am enough exactly as I am right now.

(RJ) Are there creative endeavors that you are involved with now that you’d like to tell us about?

(DS) I am very excited about my new album that I am working on. It will be released in 2024. It is my new original music and arrangements featuring some collaborations with some really great artists and musicians! Funky, uplifting, moving music.

(RJ) What are your aspirations for future creative endeavors and collaborations?

(DS) Joy, passion, and creativity are important and worthwhile and meaningful things to have in your life. I encourage everyone to make space for these things in their life and to pay attention when you feel them.

(RJ)I want to express gratitude to Dana Salzman for her thoughtful yet candid interview, both live and written, as well as her time and beautiful energy. Her work artistically embodies the journey through the cycles of life: joy and pain, love and heartbreak, winning and losing, death and rebirth, always the phoenix rising.

“Solid state dynamics, resolution, detail retrieval, and spaciousness married to tube liquidity, remarkable tone/timbre/texture, offer #%$*@! musical bliss. What more could one ask for (Aurorasound HEADA)?”

—K.E. Heartsong, AudioKeyREVIEWS! Magazine

Conducted by K.E. Heartsong

INTERVIEW: RALPH KARSTEN

This issue I have the pleasure of bringing you my interview with Ralph Karsten the very well known and world recognized owner/proprietor of AtmaSphere, which makes, as many believe, the best Output-TransformerLess (OTL) amplifiers and preamplifiers in the world.

There are more than just a few of my friends who, in truth, lust after your amplifiers and many more who are diligently gathering together funds to make the move.

As I mentioned this is more an interview to find out who Ralph is and what has motivated him and less of a technical interview. With that, let's get started.

Kermit [KH]: Where are you from? What events mark your early life? How do you think music affected your early life? Was their music in your home? Record Player? Tape player? CD player? Was there a family member or another person, who inspired your love for music/ audio?

lessons when I was 3 or 4, and again in 6th grade, but that was so I could play on the harpsichord my stepfather and I built from a kit. In 7th grade I joined the Jr. high orchestra playing string bass. That continued until well past college. During college I met Steve Tibbetts, who has a bit of national fame, and we partnered on a recording studio in my basement. Right out of high school I got a job at the Allied Radio Shack regional service department since I was already pretty good at servicing audio equipment. Both my mom and father, and later my stepfather were all into some kind of music. So I've always been around it, both recordings and live instruments. I never had a lot of money for a stereo so I was always refurbishing older gear to feed my stereo habit and allow me to buy LPs with my spare cash.

Steve Tibbetts was a guitar genius. I dabbled with guitar and sitar (took lessons at the UofM) and learned to play a simple raga, but I was never really struck enough to stick with it. I played bass because it was easy but it really wasn't my calling either. I started the studio simply to be around people that really had a audiokeyreviews.com

Ralph Karsten [RK]: Asheville, North Carolina. We moved to Minnesota when I was 14. There was a piano in our home and I took piano

INTERVIEW: RALPH KARSTEN

talent for it (Steve's bass player at the time, Robert Hughes, was a virtuoso in his own right and we were roommates for several years after college); I never thought I could amount to anything since I spent too little time with whatever instrument I was goofing off with at the time. In the 1990s a friend lent me a native American flute and I really hit on somethingwithin 6 months of that I had recorded my first for his band and so Salubrious Invertebrae began as a one person synth act. I think that peaked when I opened for Porcupine Tree in the early 2000s, just before Earl passed away. I gave Steve Wilson a copy of my CD and he was very complimentary, compared it to some of Edgar Froese's solo work. About this time I jammed with a local band Thunderbolt Pagoda, and I've been in that band ever since. album and it was carried by several distributors of native music. About that time I met a record guy named Earl Root; we became fast friends. He was interested in the audio stuff (like Atma-Sphere) and I turned him on to Steve Tibbetts the first time I had him hear my system. Early pretty well founded the metal scene in the Twin Cities and ran a radio show that is still on the air locally, 15 years on since his early death due to cancer. At the same time I started collecting some of the vintage synthesizers I had lusted for in the 1970s, refurbished them and started playing around and making recordings that I would present to Earl. He convinced me to do a show opening

KH: Most memorable epiphany that has come from listening to music or turning a good friend or a significant other on to music?

RK: my first system was a matching Knight Kit KA-95 amplifier (EL34 based) and KT-90 tuner. I started with a Garrard SL95 turntable. I built the speakers using a pair of Rectilinear 12" woofers I had bought on Canal Street in NYC in 1970. They were pretty terrible but I used them for several years; finally replacing them with a set of Altec corner horns.

KH: What catalyzing event put you on the road to ATMA-SPHERE and high-end audio?

RK: About 1976 I was introduced to Robert Fulton of FMI. His FMI 80s replaced my Altecs and eventually I had a set of his J modulars in my living room. Fulton was the first person to push high end cables in the US. So I had all that stuff too. Pretty well drank the kool aid. But I was hearing stuff on my LPs - imaging and depth, that I really hadn't given any attention before.

KH: Biggest mistake you ever made wth ATMA-SPHERE? And what did you learn from it? How did it motivate you?

RK: Shortly after going down that rabbit hole, but still 1976, I was trying to sort out how to get tubes on a level playing field with solid state, and decided that the output transformer was the main problem. But I couldn't sort out how to get rid of it- how to block the DC. I didn't know anything about OTLs at the time. Late one night I was wrestling with this problem and I dozed off. The idea of two currents flowing in opposite directions thru the same circuit, presented itself to me. Two floating power supplies for the currents and the speaker load poised between them, driven by two opposing power tubes. Quite literally I saw the schematic diagram in the dream and became so excited, I awoke and wrote it down. Later I obtained a patent on the idea, although that took at bit since there was a prior art, the

INTERVIEW: RALPH KARSTEN audiokeyreviews.com

Circlotron. What was different about my circuit is how the driver circuit drove the power tubes. I began tinkering with the circuit, and when I get the last connection made, it played! That is the foundation idea of AtmaSphere; for decades the Circlotron was featured in our amplifiers and also our preamps. I obtained later patents on how to control DC offsets at the output using a servo control, which is used in our preamps in particular.

KH: What do you believe sets ATMASPHERE apart from the other high-end audio manufacturers (laymen’s terms)? What is your/ATMASPHERE’s driving philosophy, its goals?

RK: I'm not sure if it was a mistake, but a dark time of my life was when I attempted to do a partnership with a customer who was also a millionaire. I remember thinking 'this could go really well or it could be a dance with the devil'. It seemed the latter... I nearly lost the company. What saved me was I kept my ducks in a row and didn't do anything stupid or illegal. IMO, he did, and I got the company back; we were going to win that one if it went to court. I learned a lot from that and it made me a better businessman, something at which I've never been very good.

KH: What has been a primary motivation/ inspiration for you in your personal life?

RK: For a long time, we were the only ones doing a direct-coupled balanced tube output section. It was transparent, wide bandwidth, low distortion and reliable. From my experience doing consumer electronics as I put myself through school, I learned a healthy hatred of planned obsolescence (so we have an 'update with warranty reactivation' program); some of the consumer equipment I repaired during the 1970s really didn't seem like it was meant to be fixed- like they put the circuit boards in place and then added just enough wires to make them work, but not enough so you could get in there and service it.

So when I began designing our sheet metal and circuits, I built it all with an eye towards serviceability and reliability. In time I developed an internal design philosophy called the 20-Year Rule. The idea was that filter capacitors will be failing about 20 years down the road, so other than tubes, the equipment should be able to go that long without service.

To that end, don't design for really rare tubes (I remember one well-known high end company that made a preamp using Nuvistors, which were rare and out of production when the first example of that preamp was made) and design the circuit to use readily available parts (using mil-spec derating curves) as much as possible. That principle really helped us avoid a lot of pitfalls over the last 35 years!

KH: What do you do that helps to balance the audio side of your life? Most memorable experience concerning this? What musicians did you admire, enjoy, love as a young man? Why? With regard to music, what are your five favorite albums and movies of all time?

RK: My personal motivations have been mostly to have fun- while opening my awareness at the same time. Atma-

Sphere wasn't founded to make money, it was founded because I enjoy doing it. I try to make it be the best it can be. I fail at that but keep trying. I want to see how far we can push the state of the art. I've never wanted it to be particularly expensive. In my personal life, I've tried to avoid being a constant consumer. To that end I've tried some pretty crazy stuff like building an electric truck (A for effort, but in the end was a failure due to the company that made the motor controller going out of business quite suddenly). I like older bicycles (in particular British 3-speeds) and like to keep them alive rather than buying the latest thing. I love mountain bikes. I've ridden some pretty

INTERVIEW: RALPH KARSTEN

long distances with them- such as on the Colorado Trail or the Tour Divide, which is a mountain bike race starting in Banff, Alberta and ending at the Mexican border, following the continental Divide. I've yet to complete it but I have made it about 1600 miles in the past before running out of time. I'm trying it again this year.

So five LPs...

• Yes Close to the Edge (the US press is bad, breaks up in the organ passages. The original Brit doesn't nor does the MoFi, both of which are crazy rare)

• Tangerine Dream Pheadra (yeah, is their first US release but in many ways is one of their best too)

• Yello Pocket Universe/Stella/Touch hard to call on that...

• Global Communication Pentamerous Metamorphosis (excellent example of 1990s ambient electronia)

• My 'desert island' album is Steven Roche's Dreamtime Return (CD version) It seems I never get tired of listening to this CD. My favorite is 'Looking for Safety'. It uses some very long delay reverb and I love trying to sort out how he got some of the sounds he did. I can tell that the Prophet 5 synth figures strongly, but it remains mysterious to me and I love that.

Movies:

• Forbidden Planet A ground breaking scifi with so many elements in it. A number of Star Trek original series episodes are based on themes in this one movie! The soundtrack was not considered to even be music at the time.

• Song of the Sea I enjoy animation a lot since it can incorporate so many artforms. Cartoon Saloon is a pretty neat studio!

• The Incredibles Yeah, more animation. I like the design- so much mid century modern stuff going on (especially in the second movie) and a nice swagger to the soundtrack.

• The Windwalker (1981)

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty A delightful remake...

KH: Is there anything that I’ve not covered, that you like to share or address concerning Audience?

RK: I was a big fan of Yes and Tangerine Dream back in the 1970s. I was hooked on the sound of the Mellotron (and have used one extensively with my band). I never developed a taste for blues (part of what killed that was in my orchestra days, we played just one too many Gershwin tunes- something snapped and I quit the orchestra after the performance...) and have a vestigial appreciation of jazz. Prog rock and especially Kraut rock is more my thing.

KH: Ralph, thank you for your time and letting us know more about the man behind the Atma-Sphere company and the products that are sought after worldwide and acclaimed as the best OTL amps in the world. AKRM