This is our first non-anonymous True I.D. Story.
As a musician and sound engineer, Stephen Ambrose spent the ’70s touring the world with hard rock acts. This led him to invent the world’s first in-ear monitor, essentially the progenitor to the modern-day earbud. In this True I.D. Story, Ambrose—who went on to commercialize his invention by founding Asius Technologies—reveals why Spinal Tap’s “11” is, in real life, more like a 3.5.
Editor’s Note: This story is primarily paraphrased from a conversation with Stephen Ambrose, and is not comprised of direct quotes. If there are any factual and technical errors here, they are mine, and not Ambrose’s.
As a sound engineer in the 1970s, roadies used to hate me because I’d show up for the tour with 23 flight cases and they all had to be hauled; musicians, especially the hard rock guys I was working with, need to hear themselves on stage, and they like to hear themselves LOUD, the thinking went. So there was a lot of gear.
Aside from the roadies, I had a financial incentive to develop an in-ear monitor; if I could make something that fit into your ear and gave you that crucial feedback, then you wouldn’t have to ship 10,000 pounds of speakers all around the world. The air freight on those speakers was pretty expensive.
A lot of [these rockers] had actually developed hearing damage from years of being up on stage, though they’d never admit it. Image, you know. So one challenge in designing my in-ear monitor was that it couldn’t look like a hearing aid, because no rocker wants to look like he’s wearing a hearing aid—even if he really needs one! So I made them out of gold so that they looked like jewelry.
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