Embark on a journey into the world of audio innovation with David Lee, the President and Designer behind BASSBOSS loudspeakers. In this insightful Q&A session, conducted by BASSBOSS VP of Sales Javier Olivares, delve into the profound motivations, design philosophy, and groundbreaking advancements that define David Lee's illustrious career.

Discover the driving force behind David Lee's entrance into the audio industry – a fervent passion for music coupled with an unwavering commitment to elevate the auditory experience for enthusiasts worldwide. 

Hi. Welcome.

I am Javier Olivares I am the VP of sales at Bassboss.

And today we're here with David Lee. He is the designer president and co-founder of Bassboss. 

Hi. Okay, David, let's talk a little bit about you.

 

I was born in South Africa and my parents were British and moved here in ‘79.

My father was an architect and an audio hobbyist. And so I guess I picked up some things from him and I got very deeply into the hobby and pursue it as a career after people sort of recognized what my interest and my level of involvement. And they offered me a job. And so I started working in audio and I've haven't really worked in anything else since about 1984 or something like that.

 

 

As a kid, you know, being an immigrant and not being familiar with the culture, you know, I needed to find my escape because I wasn't, you know, in the in the social cliques and stuff and music was my sort of involvement. That's my escape. And it was, you know, my pleasure, my choice. 

So I didn't have much in the way of resources, but it, it provided me such a, a wonderful experience, got me hooked on the idea of music as an experience. And as I progressed through that, I found that I could expand upon that. I could provide that for people. That's what I wanted to do. I would say, this is how cool it is. And I was not into drugs or anything like that and I wanted to have those intense experiences. So music was sort of how I could have those more and more intense experiences and making it better and more clear and louder and deeper was how I got there.

 

 

I guess it really depends on what we're going to call the first product. The first product that I designed wasn't a mass produced product. It was custom loudspeakers. The early stuff where I started was building custom pieces for specific installations and solving special problems.

And the real reason why I started was because I found that the products that we could buy at the time were not a good value. They didn't deliver what I wanted in terms of the sound, the depth and the level that we wanted to achieve and the reliability for the money that they cost. There were some things that granted they were a great value. If you look at the level, the sound pressure level and the price is like, wow, you know, that's that's a great value. But it was never satisfying on a qualitative point of view. And on the other side of that, there were certain things out there that were that's really, you know, qualitatively good, but it was ridiculously expensive.

 

 

And at the time I was working in a high end hi fi store that was the first work I did in audio was in high end hi fi and high end hi fi store. Technically, the earliest thing I did was working in a car stereo environment. And so that was like, you know, super intense bass stuff and then the same company in the high end hi fi and home theater market. But that's the stuff I would listen to day in and day out. And then when I went out for entertainment sake, the quality of the sound that I experienced in the concert venues or nightclubs was terrible by comparison to the hi fi. It was louder, but it was terrible. I was like, No, no, no. We need this quality at that level. And that was kind of the genesis of what we were, what I started to try to push towards.

My history has not been one of massive resources, so one of the most important things that I try to do with every product is to make it as dense in terms of what it can provide as possible. I call it ruthless practicality. So when when I go into designing a product, I want to I want to get my best understanding of what result I want to achieve and then filter through every component and every design choice so that every decision that's made is made towards achieving that goal. And every single element of the product has a reason for being the way it is. And realistically, nothing is in there that's wasted. Everything has a reason, everything has a purpose, and everything is intended to make it better and not like not luxury and silly stuff, but just strictly functionally better.

 

 

I like pushing the envelope. I like pushing the experience to a new level. Whether that's, you know, creating a sound field that's extremely intense for like 10,000 people. And and they're just screaming and having a great time. And they just will never forget that experience, that creating products that facilitate, that is great developing techniques for that, whether it be management and alignments and tunings and stuff like that, is another thing that I find

interesting and challenging and then creating the, you know, designing the pieces understanding all the little nitty gritty details and having not just a deeper understanding, but also a broader understanding of how humans interact with sound and not just the sound itself. I mean, that's a whole acoustics is a very complex subject. But then there's the psychoacoustics and sort of linking all the pieces together. 

I get a, um, I enjoy sort of connecting those dots and realistically, I really like the process of teaching people that not in sort of a context like this, but in the context of having them experienced that product mix and being able to do what they want. And then there, sort of eyes open. They go, “Wow, okay. So that's the possibilities!” And those kind of things are awesome because people suddenly realize, Oh, they can do so much more than they thought they could. Those kind of things are also a great part of what I get to do. Some people say that David Lee is crazy about bass.

 

 

The thing about bass in any in the audio acoustical kind of world, it's like the final frontier.

It's the it's the it's the barrier up up against which we're constantly pushing. It's the biggest wavelength. It's the longest time duration. It's it's the it's the most amount of air that you have to displace and I like to say, reality doesn't have a high pass filter. The deeper you can go. And the more of that that you can provide, the more real you, the more accurately you can sort of create the experience of whatever it is that you're trying to do, whether it's, you know, explosions in a movie or kick drum. You know, there's a huge amount of listening to information that we're filtering out in most of the production that we're doing. And this there's a there's a whole subject on the history of sound reproduction. But essentially pick a frequency. And for every octave that you go down, for every halfing of the of the wavelength, you need to move four times more air to achieve the same sound pressure level. And so, you know, we're pushing 20 hertz at this point and having enough cone area and excursion displacement to be able to produce those levels that those frequencies. That's double what you need at 40. I mean, it's four times what you need at 40. It's like 16 times what you need at 80.

 

 

Well, I mean, no, it's just that that's the sort of the demand. And it exists partly because of technology for being able to record and play those notes. And as that technology came into its own, particularly with digital equipment, there was just like, okay, how do you get there? How do you get it? How do you reproduce it? 

You can do it at low level. You can do it at a level that, you know, you can hear it in headphones or whatever. But take a step way back to the 11th century, and they were making giant pipe organs that would do 16 hertz, you know, foot pedal notes that would just vibrate the building. And it gives people goose bumps because those kinds of low frequencies are not common in nature. Very rare thunderstorms, earthquakes, you know, volcanic eruptions, that kind of thing. 

These are the kinds of things that bring about those kinds of frequencies. These are not things that you hear on an everyday. Maybe if you're something happens like a giant tree falling down and rumbles and things like that, they bring out your emotions. They really trigger your pituitary and they trigger your adrenaline. And so those are the ways that we can really enhance that musical experience and if you've had the limitation, you know, when sound systems were powered by tubes only an excursion on drivers was in, you know, tiny, tiny distances that they could move to. 

Now we have the ability to do more and more and more. But who's going to be in front? And I like to be in front. I like to have the ability to do what the cutting edge artists want to do. I want the cutting-edge artists who's pushing the envelope for that low frequency to be able to use our systems to translate that to the audience, because there aren't really any others, and certainly nothing that comes close to the practical approachability and price range that we can do with it. And so that's why I like to be crazy about bass, because the other end is much easier moving that much air, involving that many people and just creating that intensity, being able for somebody to create that music that does that and then translate, that's fun and exciting. And that's as you know, that's the kind of crazy that I don't mind being.