“I’M OF THE OPINION THAT IF YOU KEEP YOUR EYES AND EARS OPEN, YOU WILL ALWAYS LEARN SOMETHING.”
Hu g h S a r vi s
D i r e c t o r, Loudspe ake r Division, B laze Audio
As MONDO-DR conducts this interview, audio industry veteran Hugh Sarvis is in a state of flux as he is in the middle of his final month as an official employee at Blaze Audio, where he has been heading its loudspeaker development for the last three years. Having spent his entire professional career in the industry – from designing, prototyping and making loudspeakers, to supplying equipment for major productions – 69-yearold Sarvis revealed the opportunity to move into a consultancy role with Blaze, with the door also open to other collaborations. Passionate about pattern control, Sarvis developed products that were used in Super Bowl Half Time Shows and Summer Olympic Games in the 1990s, before moving to work with line array technology in the early 2000s and then, over the past 10 years, refocussing his efforts on constant directivity – a combination of line array and point source technology. Sarvis joined Blaze Audio, a subsidiary of Pascal A/S of Denmark, in 2021, and as part of the agreement Pascal purchased his laboratory in his hometown of
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Greensboro in North Carolina, which he had been using since 2014 while he was working at PreSonus. “I’ve had this laboratory where I live for several years, and in the past few years of my time at PreSonus they started to focus more on software, and move a little bit away from loudspeaker development,” commented Sarvis. “I had known of Pascal for many years having used their amplifier modules, and I contacted them to discuss amplifiers and modules, and they mentioned that they were developing the Blaze Audio brand, as they believed that was a good way to enhance the company in the long term. “They asked if I would join and knowing the CEO and the culture of the company, that’s when I decided to dive in with them and start designing loudspeakers for Blaze Audio.” Sarvis had invested in his lab following the sale of his WorxAudio Technologies company to PreSonus in 2014. “There was lots of avenues that I wanted to explore, and so I bought a Four Audio ELF robot, and a Klippel system for loudspeaker measuring,