Bill Sacks is refurbishing classic analogue Optimod processors.
The engineer is a friend of Orban founder Bob Orban and says he is doing the work with the inventor's approval.
"The idea of me refurbishing legacy Optimods came about in some conversations with Bob about how the 8000As were now a legacy product and so old that none of the original factory people remained from the time of their production", Sacks said.
Sacks was the first audio editor of Radio World in 1979 and is a former chief engineer. He worked for Carl T. Jones Associates as a consulting engineer and founded Straight Wire Audio Inc. in 1979. He also does product design for Henry Engineering, and was a member of the EIA/NAB BTSC MTS multichannel TV sound committee, which wrote the standard for analogue TV stereo sound.
He said he keeps his modifications supportive of Orban's original desire to maintain the integrity of the audio and preserve quality. "I have seen many abusive modifications done to these lovely machines and I remove the toxic and nasty sounding ones on sight".
The company will do work on 8000s, 8100s, 9000s, 9100s and other models, including television audio processors. "We do offer some special enhancement upgrade modifications and do alignments of 8100s as well". He also has released a proprietary bass EQ control modification for the 8100XT and has started to produce retrofit modules, such as LED meters for the old pointer movement meters, which have become difficult to obtain.
Sacks also set up two sites to support his venture, optimod.am and optimod.fm, as tribute and refurbishing sites, with the approval of Bob Orban.
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