The DUY story, in four acts

The founder of Macromassa described, years later, how the first synth module Duyos built for him reached his hands and what he recorded with it. He is also the man who named these machines audiogenerators, and the name stuck to them for the rest of their working life.

Neuronium recorded Vuelo Quimico at the EMI-Odeon studios in Barcelona. The credits name five DUY-built machines one by one — an audiogenerator, a modular frequency alternator, a multiple sequencer, a Selectron and the Quasar Alpha synthesiser-computer — and Rafael Duyos for general sound and special instruments.

A drum machine built for advertising work and sold in small numbers; Nacho Cano of Mecano bought two. Its maker has claimed it was the world's first digital drum kit, the Simmons that followed being analogue. Two things you can check: Simmons shipped no digital kit until the SDS7 in 1983, and Linn's LM-1 already used digital samples in 1980, the same year, though it was a drum machine, not something you struck.

Before the company had sold a single plug-in, its founder registered a method for capturing and reproducing sound in auditoriums and theatres: every source kept on its own track, its own amplifier channel and its own loudspeaker, spread around the audience and never mixed together. Filed in January 1994 and granted in September 1997; the grant was published that November.

Among the five plug-ins on the Anaheim stand there was one that was not about warmth at all. Rivers described what it was for in his own words, and the phrase he reached for would not become an industry in Barcelona for another eighteen years.

Our own product sheet for the DSPider sibling: a library of over two hundred ready-made plug-ins. It is a general-purpose catalogue, but the patch list already included Doppler-Verb and programmable early reflections — rooms, among everything else.

A trade report written on the show floor puts DUY at Winter NAMM with five plug-ins on the stand: DaD Valve, Declicker, DUY Wide, Max DUY and DUY Shape.

Paul White went through the range in Sound on Sound: European plug-ins with stylish interfaces and unusual features, from a company he described as new to the field.

Sound on Sound reported the launch at the San Francisco AES convention: forty combinable modules, over 170 factory patches, and plug-ins you assembled yourself by dragging and dropping.

Between 2002 and 2003 four professionals reached for it without being asked. Andy Gray: warm and original. Paul Carrack: warmth and colour, and his engineer Nigel Bates: the warmth and depth. Chris Porter: the warmth and roundness of glowing tubes. The word for that decade is theirs, not ours.

Charles Dye laid out the chain he used to emulate an analogue session. DaD Valve is his tube mic pre and DaD Tape his tape stage, listed beside Waves and McDSP as though it were obvious. Not a review and not an advert: an engineer explaining his method in the house magazine of the people who made Pro Tools.

Mix Sound for Film, run with the Cinema Audio Society and the Motion Picture Sound Editors. Two Master Classes in the William Holden Theatre, in a series otherwise made up of Dolby, DTS, Auro and AID. The keynote that morning was given by Mark Mangini.

Ron Bartlett, talking to postPerspective about the mix, described the reverb he had been working with and where it came from. A decorrelated reverb, he explained: add as many channels as you like and pan them into every speaker in the room.

The Audio Engineering Society put Rafael Duyos on its Audio for Cinema panel at the 143rd convention, alongside Avid, Sound Particles and Flux: four different approaches to the newest immersive cinema formats.

Avid and DSpatial ran a joint immersive audio seminar in Akasaka. The Japanese trade press covered it and introduced the second session by its speaker: the Barcelona company's founder, who had filed a 3D audio patent back in the nineties.

Four versions, and Sound & Recording in Tokyo covered the launch with a price in yen for each one. That is how you can tell a product is genuinely being sold somewhere rather than merely announced.

We built a dedicated version of Reality Builder for Mark Mangini and mapped the 54.1 loudspeakers of the AlloSphere at UC Santa Barbara for Lena Herzog's oratorio for the world's vanishing languages, shown in Venice in 2022. The work's public credits name the AlloSphere and Unreal Engine, not us, so this one is our own account.

Our tools have gone into work for Apple, Microsoft, NHK, Skywalker Sound, Sony, Disney, Warner Bros, Electronic Arts and Technicolor.