Graham Blyth is an English audio engineer who is known for designing mixing consoles. He is a co-founder of Soundcraft, a manufacturer which Blyth helped form into a world leader in sound reinforcement and recording mixers, establishing the "British sound". After succeeding in electrical engineering he became a professional organist, performing on pipe organs around the world. Blyth is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and the Audio Engineering Society (AES). In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in science from the University of Hertfordshire.
Early life
Blyth was born 22 March 1948 in Chessington; his father was an architect and his mother a teacher and painter. He was schooled from an early age in Epsom, Surrey, England. He began studying the piano at the age of four years, and in his teens worked to gain a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London. There, he learned the play the organ, then transferred to the University of Bristol in 1966 to study electronic engineering, a decision made easier because he was "hopelessly infatuated with an astonishingly pretty girl from my social group at home who'd gone up the year before." At Bristol, Blyth founded the Student Music Society, and studied orchestra conducting; as a senior he conducted a performance of Bach's complex masterpiece St Matthew Passion. After college, he obtained a position with the Compton Organ Company in their research department where he met Bill Kelsey, his early mentor, who showed him how to lay out circuits on printed circuit boards. Compton was "on its last legs", according to Blyth, and he left to join Graseby Instruments where he designed electronic filters for underwater weapons to satisfy Admiralty contracts. Blyth spent evenings at Kelsey's Notting Hill flat helping him assemble a large mixing desk, one used by Emerson, Lake & Palmer at the "legendary" Isle of Wight Festival 1970. With this success, Kelsey left Compton to form with a business partner the professional audio equipment company Kelsey & Morris.
Audio engineering
In early 1971, Blyth formally joined Kelsey & Morris where he assisted in designing and fabricating mixing consoles and loudspeakers for bands such as T. Rex, Ten Years After and King Crimson. After learning the basics of mixing console electronics, he joined Paul Dobson and Phil Dudderidge who had formed Rotary Speaker Developments (RSD), a company that built custom public address systems for bands such as Roy Wood's Wizzard, and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel. RSD made their own mixing consoles derived from a design by Bill Kelsey. In September 1973, Dudderidge and Blyth formed Soundcraft Electronics, Ltd., based at Fender Soundhouse on Tottenham Court Road in London, "right in the middle of everything." Soundcraft was the first company to build a mixing console into a road case: the Series 1S which was built by Blyth and the musicians in the band Rinky Dink and the Crystal Set, who brought Blyth into the band as keyboardist. The mixer debuted in 1974 and soon became a "hit" with UK bands, establishing the "British sound" of audio equipment.
In 2004 Dudderidge described Blyth as being focused on customer needs through the 1970s and '80s, interested in designing mixing consoles to fit: "I vividly remember lunch meetings with Albert Leccese of Audio Analysts where Graham would start designing stuff with Albert on cocktail napkins; there was a terrific synergy between them ... and the things we worked on with Tom Schlum and Mick Whelan of Electrotec prior to that were just as exciting. We produced a custom board (in a light blue frame with shiny aluminium end cheeks!) for them that eventually went on to join our inventory as the Series 4."
Beginning in 1972, Blyth and Dudderidge teamed with Roger Lindsay to form Europa Concert Systems, a live sound company that catered to American bands touring Europe. In 1991, Soundcraft debuted the Europa mixing console, a large-format desk for concert halls and tours.
Blyth's leadership was significant in the design of a wide variety of Soundcraft mixers which established the British EQ sound, including the Series 1S and the 1624 which became the 2400 in 1982, one of Blyth's favourite projects. In 1988, Soundcraft was sold to Harman International Industries. Dudderidge left within the year, but Blyth stayed to serve Harman as product designer and was responsible in 1991 for creating the "affordable" Spirit-by-Soundcraft line of mixers which sold more than 120,000 units by 1995. An estimated six million of Blyth's microphone preamplifier circuits were produced by Soundcraft from 1973 to 1997.