Nothing is as simple, basic and essential in the live event arena as the amplifier, and no one powered the business quite as well as Pat Quilter. He founded QSC Audio, proved that clean, reliable amps are possible, and he did it with genius, hard work and an astounding work ethic.
“Pat is a very bright guy, brilliant of course, but he’s also incredibly hard working and capable of working ridiculously long hours,” says long time QSC partner John Andrews. “And he’s also intellectually honest. He wants the best solution whether it’s his idea or not. One of the reasons he is so successful as a designer is he’s willing to take input from anyone, and he wove that DNA into the company.”
“QSC was known for being careful, but also in our ability to take calculated risks,” says brother Barry Andrews and the third partner of QSC. “We were very focused on the long term, and Pat is an incredibly hard worker who based everything he made on the fundamentals. Even to this day he puts in very long hours.”
Parnelli Board Member and Sound Image’s Dave Shadoan says that Quilter built the most reliable products in this business and that Sound Image still owns QSC’s Series Three amps that he purchased in the early 1980s. “If you want to know why we went to QSC and stayed with them for 25 years and never bought anyone else’s amp, it is because their products simply did not break. And they were the best-sounding amps on the planet.”
“I was the classically nerdy kid,” Quilter demurs. “So rather than getting some nerdy Dilbert-like job, I thought, ‘I can make amplifiers!’”
That First Amp
Quilter’s father was a pilot in World War II who was shot down in the Pacific, but managed to survive to provide air defense at the great battle of Guadalcanal, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. After World War II, he married Elizabeth and they had four boys, including Pat in 1946. The military kept the family on the move, and Quilter says two of his favorite places he lived were Laguna Beach, California and Honolulu, the latter inspired him musically (he still plays the Hawaiian guitar).
His younger brother Matt would pick up the guitar and become the professional musician of the family; and in related news, he would become “my lifelong acolyte and harshest critic,” Quilter says. Using what he learned in his high school physics class, Pat studied hobby electronic magazines and primitive car radio schematics. He even recreated the work of some of the 1920’s amplifier pioneers.
Quilter was studying physics, and then electronics, at Southern California’s Long Beach State College when the bass player for his brother’s band complained that he couldn’t get his hands on a good, affordable amp. Quilter took that as a challenge and spent 1967 building one, and he sold it to him for $250. Doing the math, he figured he made “three cents an hour… but then I thought, ‘well gee whiz — now I know what I’m doing’ — Ha Ha,” as the next one would be more a more profitable adventure. Or so he thought, hence the “Ha Ha.”
Around this time, he slipped out of school and begat Quilter Sound Company. “In the summer of 1968, I decided to rent a small storefront/loft space on Placentia Avenue in old Costa Mesa [California],” he says. One summer day, the longhaired, bearded Barry Andrews went to his prestigious job as a part-time substitute assistant janitor at an area school on his motorcycle. The supervisor looked him over and sent him home. Andrews started to go home, but his bike broke down. He flatfooted it to Quilter Sound Company, where a buddy worked, to get a ride home.
It would turn out to be a good day, indeed. Andrews met Quilter, they hit it off, and the next day he was at work in his shop building cabinets. (Incidentally, the buddy was one Coby Keller, who would go on to be an attorney for the company.)
“I was never a musician, but I knew how to woodwork,” Barry says.
“He got interested in the opportunity to do something that was supposed to make money — a promise that went underserved for quite a few years,” Quilter says.
Rough Start
Barry actually got on board when the struggling company was on the way down. “It was really a tough time for selling amps, as everybody was going after the flavor of the month, and it was hard to stay on top of it,” he says.
John Andrews, Barry’s younger brother, was in high school when Barry joined Quilter. “The company was on a slide downward, and they were laying off people, but I would go over after school and help build cabinets.” John would go off to college, working in the shop occasionally on weekends. “The more time I spent at the shop, the more it was clear that the business side of things needed help!” John laughs. John graduated with a finance degree from USC in 1977, and, much to the initial dismay of his parents, he stepped into the struggling amp company.
Despite lacking cash flow, the trio remained persistent and optimistic, even in the face of setbacks that would make others give up. “I remember Barry calling me one December morning in 1972 and asking if by any chance I had taken home all our inventory,” Quilter recalls. Thieves had cut a hole in the roof and walked away with their work just after building a decent inventory of their best models. Still they carried on.
“Around 1973, Marshall Amps had gotten its act together, and their products could make it through a gig without frying and blowing up,” Quilter says. “Peavey was coming on strong, too, so it looked like our opportunities were limited.”
The trio took a hard look at what was going on and settled on focusing on power amps. The goal was to build bigger and better amps using the solid-state technology that Quilter had determined was the wave of the future. “It was a classic case of learning by doing,” Barry adds. “It was a slow evolution, to be sure, and we did everything wrong two or three times before we figured it out.”
In the “necessity is the mother of” department, John explained that money was so tight for the company in the 1970s, Quilter had to come up with simple solutions to complex problems, because there wasn’t any money for excess parts. “Working within those constraints enabled him to come up with designs that featured fewer components that could break,” Barry says.
Quilter was, in fact, able to create something that seemed to be eluding everyone else: an amp people could rely on. “Our calling card was reliability,” Quilter says. “We weren’t the biggest engine on the block, but we were clean and stable.”
“One day in 1976, I put together a paper that showed how we could be the number one power amp company in the world,” Barry says. “That was pretty ambitious for a company that had lost money eight years in a row!”
In 1979, the company name was officially changed to QSC Audio Products, though the now-well-known “QSC” logo had started to appear on products as early 1974, including the 490 powered mixer, among others.
Around 1980, QSC developed the Series One 1400, a 200-watt beast with integral rack-mounting ears featuring high turbulence flow-through cooling. “It was a good workhorse amp that was one of my nicer pieces of work,” Quilter says.
When movie theaters were being retrofitted with Dolby sound, QSC did a private-label 1400 amp that “fell in a sweet spot that featured a competitive 200W per channel and a two-speed fan cooling construction and was utterly reliable,” Quilter says. “Dolby, though, quickly realized that their real money-making opportunity was their $12,000 projector surround decoder, so after a couple of amp batches, they suggested we simply sell our regular 1400 amps direct to theaters, and the rest was history. Moving into cinema became a nice, steady market, that still does well for us this very day.”
Touring World
The Series Three power amp would launch them once and for all into the touring world. The first big sale went to an Iron Maiden’s “World Slavery” tour in 1984, which took 100 of them. At the same time, they did an equally big sale to a decidedly different tour — one of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Quilter laughs about the timing of these two diverse clients because a single press release about both inadvertently went out. “I was lucky to collect the check from Swaggart before he realized who else we were selling to as well!”
“Before [the Series Three], nobody took us seriously and thought of us as the people who made simple amps that worked well,” John says. “This signaled we were going after the high performance market in tours and big installs.”
Shadoan, co-founder of Sound Image, was an early adopter of their Series Three power amp. “QSC at that point was really looked upon as an MI amp company with no touring presence whatsoever,” he says of the company in the early 1980s. Sound Image was shopping for just the right amp to put in its new LMT fiberglass speakers. “I put in an order for 24 of them and went down to their office to pick them up.” Shadoan was asked to cool his heels in the office while Quilter furiously finished building them one at a time. “I literally sat there for 12 hours with John and Barry drinking beer while Pat built them! They weren’t ready for us!” Shadoan says.
He quickly admits that Sound Image wasn’t ready for QSC either. He didn’t have all the cash to pay for those amps, but waved a Jimmy Buffett touring contract under their noses. That convinced the Andrews brothers to let him walk with the gear. It was a wise leap of trust — Shadoan says they went on to buy thousands of their amps over the years.
Sound Image wasn’t the only touring company who turned to QSC. Audio Analysts was another customer, as was ATK. “Even Clair brothers used QSC — and just as they were made, with no modifications,” Shadoan says. “And all this helped QSC become the largest amp company in the world during this period.” Among the events being powered by QSC amps were the NFL’s Super Bowl halftime shows.
In 1985, QSC launched the award-winning MX 1500, which delivered an impressive amount of power while only taking up two rack spaces. John recalls at the trade shows while their competitors was opening their boxes to show how complex their products were trying to impress potential customers, “there wasn’t a lot of stuff in ours!”
But they sure worked.
Returning to His Roots
In the 1990s, QSC invested in computer control systems. In 2004, QSC ushered in Class-D technology, which was considered the third wave of power technology that would replace traditional solid-state technology. As a veteran of analog design, Quilter could see what it would take to duplicate the behavior of tubes, but use with more efficient technology. “Our first product was the PM-1000 power module for an obscure early QSC speaker, the MD series, released late that year,” he says. “The PL-380 power amp was released in 2006.”
Then there was the trend toward powered speakers. “I tried to get us a deal with different speaker companies, but couldn’t make that work,” explains Barry. “So we decided to just ‘join them’ and make our own.” The K-Series speaker that resulted in 2009 is among the most popular in the world and still selling today. More recently, their work in network audio systems and digital signal processors are renowned. Also, they are a major player in the mid-market line array products today.
A few years back, one of their many wise business moves involved successfully and consciously grooming their future replacements. All three managed to work well together for nearly 40 years, and while they all stay involved on a strategic level, they organized a team to make sure QSC continues to forge ahead. Joe Pham joined the company in 2004, became its Chief Strategy and Technology Officer in 2007 and was promoted to President and CEO in 2010.
“QSC is really an anomaly,” says Barry. “It’s one of the few companies that is still founder-owned, still independent and still growing — we just finished our best year ever.” In addition to their headquarters in Costa Mesa, CA, QSC has locations in Boulder, CO and Hong Kong, and a worldwide staff of 400.
QSC did stretch from one of the world’s leading power amp companies to one of the top pro audio systems, but Quilter never lost sight of why he was doing it all: for the love of music. Then as he, John and Barry started to hand the reins off to the next generation of QSC innovators, it seemed retirement would be Quilter’s next step. Not so. In 2011 he returned to his first love and founded Quilter Laboratories (www.quilterlabs.com) and is once again building guitar amps.
Mountain Man, Mountain of a Man
In addition to his brilliance at the workbench, John credits Quilter’s ability to know what he couldn’t do. “My whole life I’ve heard stories about the brilliant mind behind a company who would eventually run it into the ground thinking he could do it all,” he says. “Pat is always willing to share in the success of the business and was never concerned about being right all the time. His willingness to let others take leadership roles in the company made us really well balanced.”
Quilter is at first quiet and introspective — and quirky. “He went through a 10-year ‘mountain man’ period where he’d show up looking like Davy Crockett. He’d wear the same leather pants every day and Barry and I would joke that they could stand up in a corner by themselves if he didn’t wash them soon!”
Another hobby of his is collecting unusual cars. In his collection there is an old Fiat 600 Multipla microbus among other Fiats (“They have Italian charm and style,” he says). Quilter also restored a 1951 VW car that was just like one his father owned. His other wheels including a Citroën 2CV and a late-model Mini Cooper. We’re told he’s also in the process of building a “Cyclops” car that started out as a doodle on the bathroom wall of one of his former headquarters.
Quilter also gives back. In 2013 he made a $1.6 million dollar endowment for a new concert hall for his high school, Punahou in Honolulu. The Patrick H. Quilter Concert Hall also came with funds for string instruments. “My Punahou physics class taught me everything I needed to know to get started in electronics,” he said at the time.
“I can take considerable pride that we did achieve success the good old-fashioned American way which was creating a good product at a good price,” Quilter says of QSC. “Our products go the distance.”
Pat Quilter will receive the Parnelli Audio Innovator award at this year’s gala ceremony. The event is set for Oct. 24 at the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. To reserve your spot (or table) go to www.parnelliawards.com.
