This history of the Wave Decay octaphonic amp goes back to about 2011, maybe even further. For years I’ve been inspired by immersive sound experiences and recordings that utilized the natural acoustic phenomenon of spaciousness. I’d been wanting to create a device that would let me play with sound immersion ever since I had my guitar and voice running through a tape delay pedal and four guitar amps and I heard it bounce around the circle of the band practice space I was in. That was in 2007.

The first real setup I created to achieve this goal was in 2011. I was living in Chicago and I was sharing a house with someone who was never home. There was also no furniture in the common spaces so I took over the living room as my experiment space. I had a nice audio interface to record the album I was working on and it happened to have a bunch on analog outputs on the back. I found a good eBay deal for practice amps and bought six of them. With a bunch of long guitar cables, I put them around the room, minus one that arrived with a blown speaker. I was then able to run sounds to four corners of the room and more. I played a couple of shows with this setup but it was short lived because I moved shortly after that into tiny room and then again a few months later to California and had to get rid of the amps. It was a cool experiment but unwieldy. The cheap bass amps were heavy, didn’t sound that great, and required a lot of extension cords for all the power cables.

During my time in California, I continued my quest for a cool and economic surround setup. I was an avid thrift shopper in San Francisco and was able to obtain several bookshelf stereos. I no longer had a big audio interface with all the outputs, but I was able to combine a modest two channel interface with the stereo outs on my MacBook for a quadraphonic setup. I hooked two stereos up to my combined four outputs and put the speakers in four corners of the living room. I put a futon in the middle of the room, laid it flat, and listened to the original quadraphonic mix of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I had that setup in the house for 6 months or so and I listened to a bunch of quadraphonic and 5.1 mixed albums. There is surprisingly a lot of modern music that is released in a surround sound format. Non of these releases really impressed me though. I wanted to experience something bigger and maybe something even multi-roomed.



I got a few tastes of that over my four years in San Francisco. There is an immersive surround sound experience called Audium that I went to hear that was pretty inspiring. The whole place has a 70’s Star Trek vibe and the composition that swirled around the 100 speaker room setup was less that stunning but the actual space was incredible. Then later I revisited my old favorite; La Monte Young’s Dream House in New York City. It was my third visit to the Dream House and it was during a summer when there were actually two Dream House installations. One was new and had been built in a HUGE room at the Dia art museum. I was luckily enough to see the minimalist composer La Monte Young play a concert in it. The Dream House is maybe what kicked off my obsession with immersive sound. The space is a loft in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood. It consists of four huge speaker stacks in each corner and a light sculpture. The walls and carpet are all white but the sculpture gives the room a glowing neon purple vibe. The speakers play a constant drone of maybe 36 different notes that create a really crazy non-harmony that La Monte heard in a dream when he was a kid. I’ve laid in that loud room for multiple hours and different times and the first time I visited it, one of my favorite musicians, Daniel Higgs, was there.

Anyway, in 2015, I was in Scotland working on another project when Katie took me to the amazingly ruined site that the Wave Decay Sonotorium is going to be held at. As soon as I walked in I said “I want to do something here.” I was already thinking about how sound waves would bounce around that huge decrepit space. It turned out that Katie had been wanting to do a project there for years and thus was the birth of our installation.

Fast forward to Summer 2016 and we’ve received a few grants and permission to use the space. We’ve got enough money to do the thing properly and make it beautiful, too.

I started doing research at the beginning of 2016 on how I could build an 8 channel amplifier that would be loud enough to fill the space. Buying one was out of the question because those amps are few and far between and cost almost a thousand dollars. Plus I’d always wanted to build an amp. Thanks to the help of some blogs and forums, I found exactly what I was looking for. A class D amplifier circuit board that had four channels at 100 watts each. I got two and then went through a lengthy search for the correct power supplies to give me full volume. I had those things sitting inside a DVD player shell for months until it was finally time to build which was a couple of weeks ago.

I sketched out a design for the amp case and ordered everything I needed to finish it. I got everything wired up a week before the wood arrived so for the first week of testing everything was sitting on top of a game board with all the wiring exposed. The speakers were still loose too and just sitting on the floor. It didn’t sound great yet but it confirmed that all my research and effort had worked because all 8 channels worked perfectly with no problems.

Finally the wood arrived and I cut out all the sides and installed all the controls onto the faceplate and back plate. There are two switches and two power supplies. When you flip them on, an interior red light illuminates the inner workings and you can see the fans on the amp boards start spinning through the windows. I installed two vents on top so it doesn’t get two hot in there. The interface uses 8 phono type plugs into 8 separate mono channels with eight speaker outputs.

There is no volume control. Essentially the amp runs at full volume and you attenuate it by lowering your input source, in this case a computer or a series of iPods.

The whole project has been really exciting and really rewarding. The next step is the speakers which are actually much more building work than the amp. Katie and I have spent a lot of time thinking about what they will be like and I’m really excited to see them come to life. There are eight to build and I start the speaker boxes today! They will be huge and beautiful but I won’t say too much about those until we premier the installation.