Pioneer of In Ear Monitors, Revolutionized Pro Audio
Note: Marty Garcia will be honored with the Parnelli Award Audio Innovator Lifetime Award at the Parnelli Awards Gala held on April 14, 2023 during the NAMM Show at the Anaheim Convention Center. For more info, and to get tickets, go to www.ParnelliAwards.com.
“It all came down to the fact that I had a 1964 Falcon station wagon, then a van,” Marty Garcia says of his stumble into the pro audio business. In 1978, he met Todd Rundgren, who “I blame for getting me serious about the audio business. Eventually, working first with him, I saw personal [in-ear] monitors as a tool that would allow musicians to perform in poor acoustical venues.”
For more than four decades, Garcia had a vision of a different way of stage monitoring, where artists would wear earpieces carrying a personal monitor mix. After a few years of experimenting with musician friends and then Rundgren, Garcia founded Future Sonics to refine and develop Ear Monitors® and Ears™-brand earphone monitors. “My company was founded on the idea that you can promote long and healthy careers by reducing vocal fatigue while lowering stage volume and in turn, preserve the musicians’ hearing for however long they want to perform,” he says.
“I have had the pleasure of maintaining a longstanding relationship with Marty,” says Greg Hall, senior account executive at Clair Global. “During all that time, I have consistently appreciated his exceptional professionalism and service to both our company and our clients through the years.”
Lights < Sound
The middle of five children, Garcia was born in 1954 in the coastal town of Falmouth, MA. His dad was a fighter pilot who retired as a Colonel at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bored, young Marty opted to get his GED and leave high school early. “I didn’t want to work a 9-to-5 job, and wanted to be outdoors, so I became a surveyor,” he says. Out with a crew in 1973, one member happened to be a musician playing with the band Wire & Wood. He tagged along for a gig of theirs at the famous Main Point coffee house in Philadelphia. His entry into the live event world started inauspiciously enough: The lights at that gig didn’t work correctly, and he fixed them on the spot. At another gig, he got power to the stage through the magic of finding an extension cord. At one club he was complaining to the owner about the sound. The owner shrugged and said, “well, then you do it.” He got behind the console and instinctively figured it out. “It just came to me,” he says, recalling that foretelling moment. “And I realized that sound is more important than lights.” The band appreciated all that — and that he owned a van. He started chauffeuring them around, working for the band full time, “handling lights, band gear, sound, collecting money, being band psychiatrist, all of it — this is when I got the ‘bug.’”
In the mid-1970s, Wire & Wood had an opportunity to audition to be Fools Gold — Dan Fogelberg’s backup band — and Garcia and band headed to L.A. “We found this fixer-upper in Canoga Park. Not long after moving in, something with the heating system caught on fire and we barely got out alive.” The instruments didn’t; they all burned up. The Red Cross came to the scene and gave them as a “family” $3,000 in compensation. The band agreed to go in on a Kustom-branded sound system and some instruments. Wire & Wood did not end up being Fogelberg’s band, the band broke up, and it all forced Garcia to get a “real job.”
He somehow ended up working for a government-funded program as a speech therapist assistant. Despite no training, he was working with kids facing major challenges ranging from abnormalities at birth, accident disabilities, autism, and hearing- and speech-impairments. When working with these kids, he played different genres of music in the background, and he noticed the kids reacted positively. He acquired some funding and soon was organizing busloads of kids taking them to the Hollywood Bowl for all kinds of shows. “I didn’t know much about speech therapy, but I knew music was a powerful force for them.”
Founding Crystal Sound
The experience made him want to get back into music. He was still seeing some of the musicians who stuck around Los Angeles, and they got a call from John Phillips to record at Bearsville Studio in New York, and he went with them. On the first day at the studio, he was outside when a white Ford Econoline van came barreling up the dirt drive. The driver ran into the studio and came right back out. “He looked at me, and next thing I know I was helping move a piano from John Sebastian’s house.” A beer break and socializing ensued, and then the driver said to him, “See you tomorrow, we’ve got plenty to do.” Garcia replied: “Only if I drive!”
That driver was Tom Edmunds, Rundgren’s guitar tech. It proved a pivotal moment for Garcia, as he started working with the bands who came to the studio. He landed a gig with Orleans as a drum tech going out on some gigs with them in addition to being a tech for others. “Working with a lot of bands as a drum/guitar/keyboard tech, I got a good handle on the big picture of audio,” he says. “If I weren’t doing the sound, I was busting the people who were to get it right.” In 1978, he filled in as head stage carpenter on Hall & Oates’ 1978 Along the Red Ledge tour. “During that time, I was thinking about building improved P.A. systems and started doing designs on paper napkins.” In 1979, those designs became Crystal Sound, which he based in Philadelphia. There he built a four-way, non-ported horn house system with custom low-profile, bi-amped wedges that could be manually time-aligned using a stovepipe-style mechanism. The horn slid in back and forth and could be locked down with a wing nut so that the driver alignment could be adjusted for the performer’s needs.
“One of the first things I learned was to work directly with the musicians onstage,” he says. “I employed monitor engineers — not FOH engineers — because if I could make the stage sound good and get instant comments from the musicians, then the job would be much easier on the house engineer. I recommended that bands bring their own house mixer. As a production company, I didn’t want to lose a gig because the manager, artist’s spouses and subjective audiences didn’t like the house mix.” Crystal Sound also built its own monitor and FOH consoles with Louis Stephenson of Interface Electronics. “We showed this Interface 40×16×2×1 console with four-band, full-parametric EQs on every channel to the Todd Rundgren camp and ended up doing their sound for many years,” he says. Other acts his company worked for included The Band, The Temptations and Miles Davis. He later consulted with Crest Audio, building their first stereo monitor console.
Garcia’s dedication to serving the artists on stage led to a sensitivity regarding the singer’s vocal cords. Garcia points out that it can be a competitive world on stage, and with the guitar player turning up, then the bass player turning up, etc., it creates an infinity loop of going to “11.” But the vocalist is left out of that cycle because they have monitor wedges, which you can only turn up so much before creating massive feedback. Being concerned about blown-out vocals and general vocal fatigue, he started wondering what he could do about it. While on a Grover Washington Jr. tour of Japan, he happened on a brand-new device not available in the states yet: A Sony Walkman, gifted to him by Sony executives.
Garcia then began experimenting with at-ear monitors with mixed results. It started with Garcia buying thousands of individual transducers from Sony. “I tested and matched them, just to get a few good ones.” But the standard earbuds did not seal/sit in everyone’s ears – and realizing that, he made the big leap that would change monitoring forever: a custom molded piece for the artist’s ear that he first created in early 1982. “Our first attempt used a special denture adhesive gel to make our first ear molds. We put the earbud in the ear and then put the denture adhesive around it to seal it.” But this early version was for the outside ear, rather than the ear canal. “It would cure and harden up, and we could create an ear mold from that. At this point, we realized that we could get good audio if we had the right seal.” He then worked with a local hearing aid manufacturer and made his first “shell”-looking earpieces.
On the Road to (Audio) Utopia
Todd Rundgren’s 1985 Utopia tour was historic for being the first rock show to go out with the entire band using in-ear monitors and no monitor wedges on stage. “We created the lapel mic stands gutting the newly released clip-on itty-bitty book lights and inserting Countryman 101’s. Todd did not want fixed headset booms. Todd had to sing dynamically close or further away from the mic.” He hooked up mini bud box beltpacks that connected everything, with audio returning in stereo. “Mogami multipair cable terminated to the packs with Lemo connectors connected to one small rack that carried our monitor console,” Garcia recalls. (One more fun fact about this tour: one of the roadies was Joe Lamond, who would go on to become NAMM’s president and CEO.)
Co-headlining on this tour was The Tubes, and the two bands required a quick five-minute set change. The best way to do that is to not have any gear onstage. “Todd was on Ear Monitors already, and got the rest of his band on Ears, and I figured we would supplement the mix with sidefills,” Garcia says. “The earpieces turned out so well that we didn’t have to use any fills.” The tour was a smashing success, so Garcia launched his Ear Monitors brand. Also that year, Crystal Sound merged with Taylor Sound becoming Crystal Taylor Systems (CTS). But by 1990, Garcia was “maxed out” of doing both, and sold his share of the business. “I wanted to develop Ear Monitors and the personal monitoring category full time.” In 1991, he founded Future Sonics.
The Evolution
In 1992, Grateful Dead soundman Don Pearson, who co-founded the audio services company Ultra Sound and worked with the Dead, proved to Garcia that he needed a better Class-A amplifier for hardwired systems. He started with Crown D-75 and current-limited its 75-watt output down to a couple watts. “We could hear all the transients, and the Ear Monitors had an unbelievable sound.” How good? Good enough to use in the studio. “One of U2’s studio engineers told me they used the Ear Monitors brand for some tracking.” At this point, Garcia had quite a few other artists touring with Ears, including Kathy Mattea, Phil Collins, Reba McEntire, Rod Stewart, and Gloria Estefan — among others.
Steve Miller was another key artist (and fan). “He was an important resource for R&D as he was really into the Ears for both the audio benefits and eliminating clutter onstage,” Garcia says. Increasingly, singers were drawn to the advantage of his products, though the bands that supported them were more skeptical in the beginning. For example, during this same year, he had been working with Bono of U2, but just him. “But when the band did its 1991 Zoo TV tour, they had an acoustic set performed on a B stage in the center of the audience. That’s when the others discovered that the in-ears could work for the whole band and full show.” Also during this time, the Grateful Dead went all in on them, starting with Phil Lesh, who then helped Garcia talk the rest into it. A co-headlining gig with Steve Miller Band was another watershed moment, because all were using his Ear Monitors and not only was that stadium tour wedgeless, but there were also no backline speakers onstage. Garcia continued on a roll and trademarked “Ear Monitors,” and that fall he received a 1992 TEC Award for Ear Monitors during the fall AES. “It was a very prolific year.”
It was also an enjoyable one: “I was just having fun doing this thing. There was little press or ads, no marketing — it was all word-of-mouth via the artists.” Yet much of the pro audio industry was against us in the late 80’s early ’90s. Some outspoken critics thought his product was “dangerous” as in “What are you going to do if you blow up their ears?” Garcia admits that that was a valid point, but “I knew the capabilities of this stuff and I couldn’t convince anyone, other than meeting with my own clients one at a time.”
Feedback was a legitimate concern, but Garcia had engineered the IEMs to eliminate the worse potential source of feedback. “First, you can’t make a singer’s vocal mic feed back even by putting the microphone right up to their earpiece, because there’s not enough level to generate feedback. However, that singer could walk in front of a P.A. cabinet and create feedback.” With his Ear Monitors, feedback became an audible sound — like, “I can hear some feedback” — rather than a dagger. “There can be feedback, but it’s never the same as a 2-inch compression driver ripping your head off when you’re a couple feet in front of a wedge or sidefill.” Otherwise, there were some unintended benefits that Garcia is grateful for: When Stevie Wonder started using them, he could finally walk on stage unaided now that he could have someone “in his ears” telling him where to step and when to stop. Then again, it must be noted that many artists were slow to embrace the in-ear concept because they were concerned audience members would think they were wearing hearing aids.
Refinement and Focus
In the early 1990s, Future Sonics experimented with making multiple-driver hearing aid-style armature pieces but was not finding the same dynamic qualities. While competitors jumped all over the “multi driver” marketing, Garcia pulled away from that to focus on dynamic voice coil miniature transducer technology. “When two- and three-way systems came to market, that marketing terminology created a lot of interest from users who felt that a multi-way approach must be better,” he says. “I felt it was better to make a single voice-coil transducer right and avoid all the electronic, comb filtering artifacts that come from multiple drivers. Multiple-driver technology has since come a long way, at a price, and may seem well and good, but the bottom line is when you make A/B comparisons, you’ll hear the difference in dynamics over a period of listening time. We’ll never claim to have the highest highs or want them in our earpieces; however, those are the easiest for the end-user to adjust individually with a little equalization. The hardest thing to create in an earpiece are tight low, dynamic energy frequencies that don’t distort, which is what we focused on.”
Success continued to spread, and Future Sonics’ roster of clients continued to grow. Yet Garcia did not rest: In 2001, he introduced MG4 proprietary dynamic drivers in the Ear Monitors brand. In 2002, he was a consultant and OEM’d earphones IE3 for Sennheiser’s Wireless Monitors; also that year, he introduced the first universal canal earphones, Ears EM3. In 2006 the universal-fit Atrio Series debuted, the first with 10mm FS proprietary dynamic drivers. More improvement and TEC Awards came, and in 2011 he was inducted into the TEC Foundation’s TECnology Hall of Fame. In 2018, he was honored by the Television Academy for contributions to the Emmy Award Winning Achievement, the 59th Grammy Awards.
The pandemic gave Garcia the opportunity to spend time in the lab. There he focused on other live event industries, turning his attention to the television broadcast networks, working on high-end IFBs for broadcasters — something he had done with Fox Sports and ESPN. “The spoken word is as important as the dynamics in music, and today there are more field reporters and analysts wearing our products than ever before.” When Amazon Sports took over Thursday Night Football, Future Sonics was recommended as the exclusive provider for all those on-air reporters and analysts. “FS audio quality is key, but the bottom line is durability. I don’t think anybody constantly ‘maintains’ our products – they don’t need replacing for “multi” reasons unless driven over.” Understanding the importance of getting the ear mold impression right, he still insists on having a qualified audiologist involved. “We never have anyone do a self-impression, and believe each person needs a proper hearing evaluation and of their ear canals including medical ‘ear’ history before impressions are taken.”
Garcia has avoided the consumer market and stuck with what he does well. “We have very few models because we don’t need many. It’s such a specialized area that we stay focused on the professional audio side, durability and improving our technology.” As for the future of Future Sonics, “we’re entrenched with working with like-minded people. I’m still fascinated with helping people hear better over a lifetime, not just making something louder.” Reflecting back, he’s grateful to work with many greats, and one of his fondest is Les Paul. They worked together for 18 years, “chasing more sound,” as Paul would say. In the 1990s, Paul had encouraged Garcia to continue with the voice-coil transducers, telling him, “it is the right thing to do” because it’s “how we hear, not what we hear.”
Garcia will press on for the reason he got into the business: “It is not what products they may wear today, it is about helping artists reduce vocal/hearing fatigue. Future Sonics products do that. The stage productions designs improved, as well, and now there is less stage sound equipment/trucks. It has all benefitted the touring accountant’s bottom line in many ways, including easing set changes for multiple bands.”
