“I’d complain, but it’s a pretty good life,” says Ken Freeman of MSI. “This business has been very good to me and my family, and I am thankful for it.” He smiles and adds: “It sure beats sitting in the office becoming another old fat sound guy.” Freeman is MSI technology sales manager and has been in the audio business since 1986.
While studying chemistry at San Diego State University, he moonlighted as the campus stage manager and technical director. When he went pro, he found himself as an electrician for such world tours as Michael Jackson, U2, The Who and Madonna. He was a sales and marketing specialist with Yamaha when they rolled out the PM 4000 console. Freeman worked for MSI from 1990 to 1997, took a pair of years off to be the technical director of the X Games, then returned in 1999.
Since the company was founded, in the days when Woody Herman and Ella Fitzgerald were the Bon Jovis and Katy Perrys of the day, MSI has done a lot of corporate work. “We do product rollout, presentations, a fair number of AARP events. But we have a lot of special relationships, too — for example, this is the 20th year providing for the MLB All Star Fan Fest.” He’s particularly proud of the latter, as it requires a great deal of trust from the client and an amazing level of skill from the MSI to bring their fully vetted system to life. “There are the usual large venue challenges, but even though it’s a ballpark, we treat it like a showroom.”
History
The company’s roots go back to 1946 when two brothers, Max and Victor Hall, thought the growing city of San Diego needed an audio/visual equipment company. Meeting Services Inc. was formed, and the company grew along with the city. They installed sound systems small and large, and were on hand for trade shows, conventions, sporting events and political speeches. Try to beat this: they’ve provided services for every U.S. President since Harry S. Truman.
“In spite of the best security on the planet, I have had the opportunity to meet every U.S. president and their wives since Gerald Ford,” says Freeman. “And I was an A-2 for President Nixon’s funeral in Whittier a few years back.”
Over the years, MSI has been on hand to set up the speakers and run the board for the likes of Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and the Beatles, among hundreds of others acts. These days, MSI mainly stays on the sidelines of the ultra super tours, often sub-renting gear to larger companies. “We’re the racks-and-stacks solution.”
Some of the historic hotels in the San Diego area, including the El Cortez and the Hotel Del Coronado, have turned to MSI again and again for their AV needs. Since 1989, they’ve been the in-house production company for the San Diego Convention Center. MSI also supports events staged for the San Diego Chargers, the Padres and the Symphony. They are also production partners with ESPN, Major League Baseball, Microsoft and the NBA.
Today, Ed LaFever, John Brinkman, Tom Bollard and Ray Lucy run the company as owner/partners. The company boasts 22 separate sound systems, a full video production suite and a staff of engineers and technicians. They have close to 60 full-time employees working in 60,000 square feet of warehouse space.
But despite being a full-service operation, they like to say that “there’s a reason that “Audio” comes first in the term “AV” — nothing matters if the presenter, performer, or president can’t be heard. The company stocks more than 500 JBL, Meyer, TAD, EAW, Apogee, Woodworx, Ramsa, and Yamaha speakers with all the appropriate amplifiers, processing, rigging, stands and brackets. Yamaha, Soundcraft and Ramsa consoles handle front of house or monitor mixing.
“As for the newest speakers in the house, we have JBL VerTec, which we bought in 2000,” Freeman says. “We were one of the earliest adopters. We have the ‘89s, 88s, and added in smaller [components] as needed. These are one of the few products that are now worth more used than when we bought them used!” he laughs. “It’s a reflection on JBL as an organization that they are committed to constantly improving the gear you buy from them. They partner with companies, and then constantly improve what you bought by writing new software for it. That’s something we look for as a vendor.”
For microphones, it’s a matter of filling the rider, but they are heavy on AKG, Shures and Sennheisers. When it’s not rider-driven, he likes to evaluate and usually graduates to a slightly different tool set. “We’ll use AKG DMS 700 primarily.”
An Emerging Democracy
Freeman has got stories much farther from home — including one hair-raiser that took him to a newly-formed African country. Last year, MSI was called in by Lighting Design Group of New York to install a sound system in Juba, the new capital of Southern Sudan, which had split from the authoritarian dictatorship of the north.
“We installed audio for a press briefing room in downtown Juba,” says Freeman. “It’s the sort of thing you look back at and think, ‘Wow, that was risky!’ But it was a humbling opportunity, to give voice to 20 million people wanting a freer country. You can’t pass that up.”
It was a 40-hour journey involving several planes (including “some puddle jumpers”). “Nobody has a permanent base, so the plane brings everything — tables, chairs, printing machines, garbage cans.”
The proper electricity needed was rarely available, and when it was, rarely reliable. And when something needs to be replaced, it’s not like you can call up the local pro audio supplier … “So when you’re working half a world away from home, you want to choose [products] wisely and build in spare power supplies, etc.” He went with Crown power amps, JBL speakers and Shure SM57s. He also went with an APB Rack Mixer that “is as a terrific product as anything else I install.”
Yet he wasn’t done, as just choosing the gear wasn’t enough. Because of the language barrier (Freeman is apparently a little rusty on his Sudanese Arabic), he had to sit down and write a special manual that was a collection of pictures and drawings, showing where knobs need to be moved.
“It was an honor to participate in that.”
Closer to home, and more recently, MMS headed to Anaheim, CA. “We help a number of key manufacturers show and display their wares in conjunction with the NAMM show. This year, we were working for the Harman team, Yamaha MI and Yamaha Commercial Audio at various venues throughout the show floor and surrounding properties. We also helped out NAMM with lighting and AV in conjunction with these performance spaces.”
Another pressure-cooker gig was a ship launch for General Dynamics’ NASSCO. “These are always good fun,” Freeman says, with a wee tad of sarcasm in his voice. “We go into a commercial shipyard and build a video studio and complete live event production for 5,000 people. Our client then invites the community and local stakeholders to participate. Needless to say, we do this when the tide is high and have no second chances. We build a lot of redundancy in these systems, as we are working in a industrial site where train cars roll through the job site, cutting our camera triax, and the testing of a broadband marine radar system makes wireless microphones all but useless.”
Intellectual Resources
“I’m constantly on the hunt for things that touch my clients and can improve what we do for them,” Freeman says. Right now he’s on the hunt for a better intercom system. He points out there’s three sets of parallel devices, including the iPhones crew members typically carry, to get from the plane to the end of the gig. “I think there should be one. Not sure if the audio manufacturers can do that…”
MSI is dedicated to keeping up with the continuous technical revolution that is pro audio, but that entails more than “merely” choosing wisely and writing checks. “You need the intellectual resources, the quality people, as these technically complex systems come with a steeper learning curve,” Freeman says. “Everything now is a much larger tool set. Everything has an Ethernet component and needs an IP address, so the engineer has to be a good computer technician to get everything up and running. When I was an engineer, I’d show up with a pair of headphones and a bottle of water and make it through any day. Now, you come with an iPad, a router, plug-ins, your laptop … those are the kind of things in my tool kit, and I ask my guys to bring similar solutions so they can be efficient and do the work.
“Think about it: the revolution of mixing a Yamaha board with the iPad is now normal.”
But there are some old-school ways that will never go away, he adds, with a laugh. “Kids” coming up in the business might think it’s a matter of “coming with the brief case, putting on the white gloves and mixing. But long before, somebody is pulling greasy speaker cables, hoisting heavy speakers. You have to do that work, understand it, and know what it means to work safely. It’s our responsibility to impress the next generation that in addition to cool plugins there might be 12 hours of hard work long before you sit at that mixing console.”
