By George Petersen
LAKE HIAWATHA, NJ — Empirical Labs began in 1988 as a recording studio and electronics consulting company, founded by Dave Derr, a design engineer who was employed by Eventide as part of the team on the H3000, H3500 and DSP4000 Ultra-Harmonizer products. Stemming from Derr’s love of compressors such as the 1176, LA-2A and Gain Brain, Empirical Lab’s first product — the Distressor — was unveiled in final form at the 101st AES show in Los Angeles in November of 1996.
Here was a company that essentially no one had ever heard of, yet with after a quick headphone demo on the AES show floor, I was blown away by the sound of the Distressor — this box with the funny sounding name and HUGE white knobs, which became part of its trademark look.
Distressor’s classic “knee” compression combined with user-programmable warm distortion was just right for adding life into sterile digital tracks.
This wasn’t a case of a big money conglomerate trying to buy their way into the industry; this was a fledging grass-roots startup company with an amazing product that the pro audio world needed to know about. After speaking to both Derr and Empirical Labs’ distributor Gil Griffith of Wave Distribution, they were thrilled with my response and agreed to loan one of their first production units to check out.
In fact, Gil was somewhat surprised by my immediate reaction, as he said in 2015 on the product’s 20th anniversary. “When we took the (prototype) Distressor around to people in 1995,” he recalled, “folks said ‘c’mon Gil, does the world need just another compressor?’ Well, 20 years and 26,000 Distressors later, I guess it’s not ‘just another compressor.”
Flash back to that 1996 AES Show debut. I wanted to push this first-ever product review of the Distressor through the magazine production chain at warp speed, and assigned artist/producer/engineer Barry Cleveland (who later became one of the editors at Electronic Musician and Guitar Player magazines) to write the review. I published his “Field Test” of the product a month later, in December, 1996.
Although I had no idea of the circumstances, Empirical Labs was strapped for cash at the time. Every incoming dollar from sales was immediately turned around to buy more parts to make more units, and Barry’s overwhelmingly positive review of the Distressor helped keep the company afloat in those early days. In fact, his review was somewhat prophetic, even from his opening sentence: “Every once in a while, a product comes along with ‘classic’ written all over it. And in a certain sense of the word, this product actually is a classic already.” No truer words were even spoken, as the Distressor became an immediate hit.
In 2015, I had the honor of inducting the Distressor into the NAMM TEC Awards Tecnology Hall of Fame. In fact, Derr was both surprised and somewhat humbled to be one of that year’s award recipients, especially as the other nine 2015 honorees included the Fender Rhodes Electric Piano (1965); Sony C-37A Microphone (1955); 3M Scotch 100 Recording Tape (1947); Electro-Voice RE20 Microphone (1968); ARP 2600 Synthesizer (1970); Otari MTR-90 24-Track (1979); TC Electronic 2290 Digital Delay (1985); SIA Software SMAART Audio Analysis Program (1995); Propellerhead Reason Music Software (2000) — and of course, the Empirical Labs Distressor.
“It makes us very proud to be grouped alongside classic gear,” Derr said at the ceremony, “like the Rhodes Electric Piano, the ARP 2600, TC 2290, Sony C-37a & E-V RE20 microphones, the Otari MTR-90 and other stuff I’ve either owned or coveted. Call me geeky — I don’t care! And thanks for the honor!”
What Derr forgot to mention was that by 2015, Empirical Labs had already established itself as a classic among both studio and touring sound users, selling well over 20,000 units worldwide.
Besides manufacturing solid, made-in-the-USA signal processing equipment used by recording, live sound and broadcast professionals all over the planet. Empirical Labs also produces plug-ins for digital audio workstations (DAWs) and software for digital signal processors.
The original Distressor may have gone through a number of iterations over the years, but one thing has remained unchanged. According to Derr, the company philosophy is extremely simple, but hard to live up to: “We want to make products that work a little easier, a little better and a lot longer — and make sure they’re fun to use.” Not a bad idea. And now, after building more than 40,000 units, the Empirical Labs Distressor continues to prove that great analog gear can thrive in a digital world. And that’s a story with a happy ending.
For more info, visit www.empiricallabs.com
