HIstory of the iZ RADAR 24-Track - Barry Henderson | NAMM 2020

[@anniedogmine]

I remember the first time I called IZ and how surprised I was to get one of the owners the owners, Barry, on the phone. During countless follow up calls ,Barry was always there to answer questions . I never pulled the trigger unfortunately. We did continue talking many times over a few years as RADER became even closer to what I was looking for. Barry never became impatient in answering any questions and he was tireless ,enthusiastic and always kind. A true teacher. I wish I would have gone with RADAR in the beginning and taken what at the time seemed like a large financial plunge. In retrospect I would have actually saved tons of money, time and frustration and downtime . Also possibly might have added a few more years to my life. Thank you Barry for you time and patience and best of luck with your future endeavors . You are a true Gentleman .

[@thomaskunz3726]

You blow my socks off!!! I have to look into these ceramics for one of my brainchilds

[@cmath8577]

He is the reason I bought a Radar.

[@chriswilliams67]

I had no idea of the depth of ingenuity involved. Absolutely stunning.

[@soupforare]

Great talk/interview, I remember always dreaming about using a RADAR in the opcode days. I'm on UAD+Cubase now but dang, still great tech because it was always mindfully designed and constructed.

[@whatspadethinks]

11:30 onward where Barry's explaining the RADAR's unique ceramic boards totally gave me goosebumps. It's brilliant and explains why RADAR 1's are so notoriously stout, and why all the different versions sound so good. I do picture Barry's wife standing behind the camera waiting, rolling her eyes & thinking "Aww f*ck, here he goes again..." 😂

[@ArthurStone]

Thanks. Great interview. iZ RADAR Studio owner//user. Its an honour to use gear and know its the best available. Thanks Barry and UTBT.

[@wearashirt]

an humbling, honest tech company history that's amazing. You won't get this from Protools!

[@cliftoncameron5632]

Incredible. Thank you both for this conversation.

[@earworm]

I’ve always wondered about these units. The engineering that went into making them is way more than I thought.

[@0xSLN]

Great to hear the story directly from the maker of such a unique design!

[@vintageaudioworkshop]

Very impressive

[@m.o.n.d.e.g.r.e.e.n]

ive done most of my pro albums on tape at studios with an engineer. but now im starting to put together my own studio im just daunted by getting a machine because im not a science kid at all. studer a80 is my fav tape machine that ive worked with so this guy having that as a reference is a great start! really like what im seeing of radar and i think it might bridge the gap between tape and logic pro. thanks for recoding this interview because finding out stuff about radar is not so easy so far.. also wholesome ending!

[@griffini19]

Barry is brilliant and Radars are fantastic!!!

[@churlishbeardo]

Wow, I must have read somewhere that RADAR was based on BeOS, but that's a welcome flashback to twenty years ago. I used BeOS way past its expiration date.

[@pedromorgan99]

Whaw.. Was an engineer at Audio One (Trident) and client hired "radar" for day.. but session cancelled.. so we had a good time and it was brilliant. cool editor for us tracking engineers. Upstairs.matering were two Ams audiophiles at £KKK (2hours so can compile cd to sony.DCM).. but we had the AMS reverb/delays downstairs with 8 seconds... etc.. The main snag in them days, was to actually stick stuff on 24trk (ie 23+TC) tape at end of day.. to make a copy to send off "remix engineer" etc.and certainly slaving 3*24tracks to a an umatic and mix of to dat + 1/2 tape was the day.Particular film and soundtracks.(we had a 24trk copy room.. heard all the hits with a simple monitoring mixer) One thing about 24track + slaves was it let one gang up tracks and takes.. and kinda leave the guitar solo decisions to later, which is what I used it for a couple of times... with series E.SSL (spits) But at end of day output was targeted at master reel.

[@Markcallan1000]

Genius

[@regortex3364]

I live in Vancouver and used to drive past iZ Technologies often, I could never even dream of affording one but always thought they were way ahead of their time.

[@UndertheBigTree]

I did it once and once only, when I sold my house 15 years ago. Mine is currently broken, but Barry is helping me get it working again. I'd like to use it for another 15 years!

[@regortex3364]

Under the Big Tree - very cool, I’ve seen them pop up on Craigslist once in a blue moon and been tempted.

[@asongyetsung9140]

@@regortex3364 I bought my first in 92 I think, then bought 4 more Radar II's ...After that it was Radar 6's and now Radar Studio... The greatest recorder ever! And Barry was amazing help all the time, even on holidays he would call back and talk me thru a problem. Totally Amazing. And in his absence, Ray has been a wonderful help also. Still own three units, and I'm actually considering having my fully blown Radar Studio, switched back to a Radar 6, like my others....In far t I'm not sure why I purchased that model, I have never used any of the features it has.... Go figure.

[@JohnGauge790]

There’s a reason Daniel Lanois has used Radar for so long. Now you know;).

[@Eric-hq2zy]

the legend

[@reallyniceaudio]

wow what a ninja!

[@jimrogers7425]

While I've not watched the entire video, by just over 7 minutes in, Barry has not said ONE THING about Otari's contribution to making the RADAR what it is today. From my own understanding as a former Otari employee, and someone who also did service calls on them around the country, when Otari first saw the original RADAR, there were so many features that it needed, which was the reason that a lot of people initially didn't have confidence in the unit. However, with customer feedback from Otari, the RADAR improved tremendously. The team that designed the RADAR were engineers, not recording pros, so they had no idea about the way a studio ran and what end users wanted. All in all, when Creation Technologies finally pulled the RADAR from Otari and took it back as their own product, all the bugs had been worked out and the design team finally understood what pro users are looking for. This is not to down the unit, as I'm with them in the feeling that it's the BEST SOUNDING (as well as the EASIEST TO USE) digital multitrack on the market... it's just that Barry appears to be snuffing out the real contributions of a company that made the real difference in the success of that product.

[@nickwallette6201]

Yikes. This is hard to watch. "MIDI is RS-232 on steroids .. just speeded up" ... what? "Linux doesn't have [a real-time kernel] but you can add it with plug-ins" ... uh... whut? "Guaranteed latency, regardless what's running" ... that's .. not ... a thing. You can either have variable latency with no limit on concurrent tasks, or you can have guaranteed latency WITH a limit on concurrent tasks. How you schedule tasks -- prioritizing completion or timeliness -- is an engineering decision, but you only have so many cycles per second to do so much work, and there's no technology in the world that can break that restraint. Clock it faster, or add cores, or do less. Those are your options. There's nothing at all special about that. And all this nonsense about timing and DSP and avoiding pops and clicks... this is literally describing the design of ... like ... any digital audio device. I mean, yes, you need all the things that depend on the sample clock to be timed together. Anything where data goes in, gets processed, and comes out in a way that isn't deterministic (like software) needs a buffer, a way to move data in and out of that in bulk, and to be supplied or consumed at a timed interface boundary according to the sample clock again. Congratulations. That's how my first PC sound card, a Sound Blaster Pro, worked. Feat of technical engineering, there. BeOS was so performant because it had a minimal kernel and a multi-threaded UI in a time when Windows and Mac OS were both saddled with legacy baggage, cobbled together to meet market demands, and more focused on being flexible and complete than being fast. BeOS was indeed fantastic, and a good pick for something like this, but it wasn't inherently uniquely qualified. It just came out of the box trimmed of fat ... mostly because they hadn't built enough of it yet. "You need 1K, you make it this long. You need 2K, you just make it twice as long" "Brilliant." No. No it's not. That's just how resistors are made. Like, normally. High-precision ones are laser-trimmed. That's just normal manufacturing. That's like extolling the virtues of _round_ capacitors. "The PSU switching is synchronized with the sampling rate" ... good lord. Talk about solving problems that don't exist. "And you can't use low-pass filters to clean that up." Uh, yeah, you absolutely can. BTW, how do you regulate the voltage if your PSU switching is locked in time? If you're not allowed to vary the frequency, are you still allowed to vary the pulse width, or would that cause audible glitches, so instead you have to engineer the device to always present a constant static load? /s This seems to fall under the category of "saw a need, filled a need, right place right time." I don't for a second believe that ceramic PCBs were the secret ingredient here. Nor 18V converters. Nor PSUs tuned to A-432. This is full of silly engineering woo-woo that other manufacturers seem to be doing just fine without, and I honestly can't tell if this dude was sold a bill of goods from manufacturing partners, just enjoys unconventional approaches for the sake of it, or is trying to distinguish the product on the basis of "counter-clockwise screw threads sound better because ... _science_ reasons."

[@SidJones-un5cp]

Yikes this is hard to read As the former Senior Software engineer for iZ and the development of the Radar24 I find this comment hard to take seriously. First I worked closely with Barry for many years and he has an exceptional understanding of hardware and its design implementation in RADAR products however his software knowledge especially when it comes to coding was limited. I was hired shortly before iZ broke off on its own from Otari, the first Otari Radars were running an extended DOS OS that had serious limitations. I was instrumental in recommending a replacement OS for the upcoming RADAR 24. As Barry says the choices were Windows or MacOS(pre NextStep aquisition) quickly dismissed for many reasons not just the ones you suggest. Linux was looked at but would have required versions with patches to the kernel to make it more deterministic(not plug-ins Barry confused). QNX as true real time OS was researched and was a front runner except for cost per unit. BeOS was chosen as it was much more deterministic with its true preemptive multithreading and after we added low level timers to the kernel it met all our requirements. The software running on BeOS could be running up to 30+ threads at any given time. The Sound Blaster pro was a good product at it's time (stereo at 22.05 kHz and mono at 44.1khz at 8 bits hacked to do 16 bits) but seriously is a toy compared to a RADAR24 which could record and playback 24 channels at up to 24bits and 192 khz with appropriate AD/DA board each with 8 channels. There is no audio buffering going on with in the OS as the OS/PC bus never sees the audio samples during playback or record the AD/DA boards are connected to the Adrenaline card and DSP with a separate bus the samples are received and written directly to the hard disk by the DSP there is no file system the only buffering is the block size of the disk one block per channel. Software running on BeOS just controls the functionality of the Adrenaline and other cards connected to this separate bus. I hope this has cleared up your confusion about the RADAR software. Barry would have to address your hardware misconceptions. At the time of it's release and for many years and further model releases later nobody in the industry could touch iZ products for their robustness(hardware and software), ease of use, quality of sound and level of support. But Cleary I am biased.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@SidJones-un5cp I appreciate the write-up. It's interesting detail. For the record, I don't doubt that the device was functional, performant, and met a genuine need. Watching the interview, my "audio sales guy" BS detector was going off. Maybe that's just a case of a few decades having gone by since those engineering days. It's entirely possible that he was (maybe still is) a brilliant engineer that has forgotten more than I'll ever know about this stuff. It was still a hard interview to watch. There may have been some real technical achievements to brag about -- in fact, there obviously were. But the video had a lot of trumpeting about things like precision-trimmed resistors (which aren't novel) and generic claims about sampling and DSP that, at least as-described, also weren't novel. And stuff like the materials used in PCBs (if it mattered that much, it would be more common -- at least in high-end gear -- and it isn't), and the whole bit about PSU timing that sounds dubious at best, and at worst, makes so little sense that it's difficult to imagine how that's even a viable option. Implementing DSP to read directly from A/D, and form a data block to be written directly to disk? OK, that's clever. But that does beg a few questions: Does the OS use the same disk to load and write its own data? If the OS isn't in the loop for storing audio data to a file system, how do you multiplex OS I/O with audio data I/O? And for that matter, hard disks at that time just weren't very fast. You would HAVE to buffer more than a single block just to ensure that your drive had the time it needs to seek to the next block in time to avoid a gap in audio playback. If it's truly random-access (which I assume it would have to be, if you're allowed to do anything other than linear recording and playback with no edits), then it could take up to, say, 20ms to find the next block on-disk. You have to anticipate that and store that pre-fetched data somewhere, else you're just playing dead air while the old mechanical heads lumber over to the position you asked for. Sounds like a buffer to me.