ADAP
What is ADAP?
The ADAP (for Analog Digital Audio Processor) was an early DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) built around an Atari ST. It was originally developed in the Silicon Valley, but the development team soon moved to southern California where the film and music communities made quite some use of it. The choice of the Atari ST as a basis eventually proved an insurmountable hurdle as the Mac and PC took over the market.
ADAP I was RAM based. ADAP II was a disk recorder. ADAP II could work with files an hour long making it suitable for mastering "albums". But ADAP's real strength and selling point was its deep integration with SMTPE timecode. Today a free PC program like Audacity does more than an ADAP when it comes to editing. And using SMPTE timecode to sync audio seems almost quaint in the world of SoundTools and Avid.
The ADAP project was hosted by Hybrid Arts. Hybrid started as a music software company providing early MIDI sequencers for the 8 bit Atari and then "SmpteTrack" on the Atari ST. The ADAP was an early sampler costing an order of magnitude less than a Fairlight or Synclavier when introduced. The ADAP was adopted by a lot of sound effects people working in film and video production.
If you are interested in downloading ADAP software, you can find links further down this page.
One of the first things I remember doing with the ADAP was reversing a sound. Hard to believe this was such a novelty at the time. The TV series “Twin Peaks” made heavy use of ADAP’s edit page reversing sounds to create their evil voices. The actor would speak the desired line, then the recording was reversed. The actor would learn to say the phrase phonetically and then it would be again reversed. Early Simpsons episodes also used ADAP. One sound effects guy showed me a MIDI keyboard set up with laughs on each key. He could (and did) provide the laugh track for a sitcom from the keyboard.
SmpteTrack and ADAP were linked by their tight coupling to SMPTE time code. ADAP had a lot of features supporting audio tightly synced to SMPTE time code. This was critical for professional audio production.
ADAP was preceded in the market by devices like the Fairlight and Synclavier, each of which cost well into in six figures. An ADAP I had a retail price of $1995. This was almost accessible to hobbyists. A fully equipped ADAP II with rack mounted Atari and HDU retailed for $10k. This was definitely going cheap. SoundTools and the WaveFrame’s AudioFrame cost more. The WaveFrame box was handling 8 channels while ADAP II was handling 2. WaveFrame was built on top of a PC. At its genesis ADAP provided the best quality 16 bit sampling at the lowest cost. It had tight SMPTE time code integration and respectable MIDI performance. But ADAP was unable to move up in the market to more tracks and more audio editing features. And the low cost market was constantly gaining. By the end of ADAP’s run an ADAT recording 8 tracks to VHS tape and devices from Akai and Tascam were serving a bigger market at the same cost.
Beginnings and ADAP I
The original ADAP I developed out of the Hippo Sound Digitizer, made for the early Atari ST in 1985 or 1986. It had an 8 bit ADC and the software looked a lot like the EDIT page of ADAP II. Wendell Brown did the hardware. Rick Oliver did the software. Nilford Labs was the company Wendell created for this purpose. Wendell then was a serial entrepreneur. He was full of good ideas, but long term focus was not his strength. Wendell and Rick and a few others worked out of a house in Sunnyvale, CA. I think it was on Williams Rd in San Jose.
I first heard of ADAP from a flyer shared by Hybrid Arts at summer NAMM, 1986. I met Rick and Wendell at an Atari Convention, probably in October of 1986. Seeing their wire wrapped TTL multiplier I suggested that TI's TMS32010 DSP would be an easier way to implement the processing for MIDI. The next time I saw them they had a prototype ADAP I digital board and I joined up.
The two DSP's in the ADAP I ran at 20MHz and had 8k of RAM in two 4k banks. The open board on the right (above) is the prototype I used for my senior thesis in college. The ADAP I analog board might work with an ADAP II, but its successive approximation ADC with the hand aligned Burr Brown DAC (PCM-53) was definitely inferior to that of the ADAP II. ADAP I analog boards had 1/4" TRS jacks. They were not as deep as later ADAP II analog boards and had the "SOUNDRACK" logo on the top.
There was a great crush of satisfyingly intense work over the holidays in 1986 leading up to a showing at Winter NAMM, 1987. Hybrid had a booth in the Anaheim Arena and every 30 minutes a laser projection would accompany "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". This was courtesy of the Hybrid Arts founders who had previously built laser projectors. Or was that 1988? I vaguely remember a smaller booth in 1987. I do clearly remember Rick coding on the show floor.
As illustrated, ADAP I had six "pages". The edit page was the most established. It came over from the Hippo Digitizer. It was limited to storing the sound in the RAM of the ST. A 1040ST could work with barely 13 seconds of 44.1k stereo sound. A Mega4 could handle 35 seconds. The "MuZines" web page hosts three articles about ADAP I:
Three articles on ADAP I from the “Music Magazines” archive:
http://www.muzines.co.uk/gear/26/16/0
(specific links)
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/hybrid-arts-adap/973
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/hybrid-arts-adap-soundrack/2101
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/hybrid-arts-adap1-soundrack/4491
The Keyboard page (or MIDI page) was heavily influenced by the music industry contacts of the folks at Hybrid Arts. Jeff Faire, Bob Moore, and Frank Foster come to mind. I remember an early contact with the keyboardist from the Pointer Sisters.
The SMPTE page was a later addition, but also crucial. Justin Souter wrote it. This allowed you to create a playlist of sounds which would be triggered at specific times as the ST could read SMPTE timecode on its serial port thanks to Joe Fitzpatrick's SMPTEmate.
The oscilloscope was a quick demo. The harmonic spectrum plot was the result of my senior thesis in college.
The rack page was interesting. When it came out flangers and delays with this much memory were rare. But dedicated boxes quickly surpassed the features written into the rack page. The latter three were dropped from the ADAP II product line.
Writing this reminds me of the production process for these boards. The gerber files for the PCB were generated on a DOS machine and we hand delivered a 5 ¼ floppy to the imaging house that would print them. It didn’t seem uncommon to get 3 day or faster turn on the boards made locally. Nowadays this all happens in China via the Internet. The production house was in San Jose, maybe on King Road. I remember going there with a capacitance meter to reject capacitors that were too far out of range for the analog filters.
DEI: “Dabney Eats It”. Dabney was (is?) a house at Cal Tech. Rick was one of several Cal Tech folks involved with ADAP.
ADAP II
I attended the ICMC (International Computer Music Convention) in 1987 in Champaign-Urbana, IL and I was recruiting for Hybrid. I met Paul Hershenson with the delegation from UCSD’s CARL program. I remember a wonderful discussion about the virtue of stairwells as a reverb chamber. Paul joined us to work on the hard disk recorder. I remember seeking out early experimenters in hard disk recording who had to go to great lengths to time access to sound with the rotation of the disk. That really was never an issue for us. Drives only got faster and cheaper. Bigger capacity and smaller size.
Hybrid Arts acquired the ADAP along with its development team from Nilford Labs in early 1988. We joked that Wendell lost us to Rainer (Hybrid CEO, Rainer Poertner) in a poker game.
Where was Hybrid?
I mentioned the house on Williams Rd in San Jose. That was Nilford Labs. Nilford later moved to an office on the west side of South DeAnza Blvd in Cupertino.
Early ADAP II development still took place at the old 11920 Olympic Blvd office. Lunch was often across the street at Pepe O’Brian’s. “Good Stuff Burgers” is still there. The old brick building was backed up by a junk yard and we had a rat problem. One hot summer (1989?) the junk yard decided to poison the rats. Some quantity of them died at the condenser of Hybrid’s air conditioner. I think we went through 4 admins that summer as the stench was unbearable. I also remember experiencing an earthquake in this building. It was nothing special, maybe a 4.5. I remember running to each door frame (the safe spot) and thinking, no, this isn’t safe. Keep running! The old brick warehouse home of Hybrid is replaced by a white and green office block at 11900 Olympic. The junkyard is gone, replaced by the Metro Expo line which goes rit right past both Hybrid Arts offices.
Soon after this we began moving to 8522 National Blvd. I say “began” because the new office wasn’t ready yet so we moved into the older part of the building for a few months. I suspect there was no air conditioner there. The labs were upstairs. I fondly remember walking out on the roof at sunset. Eventually we moved into the new building with the oval opening. 8522 National is still there. Here are a couple of recent pictures, courtesy of Brad Eisenhaure.
ADAP II Design
The ADAP II was primarily designed to bring us to hard disk recording, but it was improved all around. The DSP's were beefed up to be TMS320C25 running at 25Mhz and with 32k of RAM. We stayed with TI DSP's for compatibility. We used an assembler running on the Atari and written by Paul Hershenson. We used Megamax C to program the ST. The "huge dongle" construction was replaced by a rack mounted box with a cable. We would purchase Mega4 ST's, throw away the plastic case and mount them in a matching rack box. The analog box was redesigned from the bottom up.
Harvey Rubens was my analog design mentor. He suggested the video op amps in the feedback loop. This gave the professional level XLR outputs a very strong and stable drive which allegedly translated to better bass over long cables.
The PCM61 DACs were driven by a Yamaha 4x oversampling digital filter. This was a brand new concept. The YM3434's data sheet was proud to announce that the DAC would not need an external "degritcher".
The ADC was an early sigma-delta device, the Crystal Semiconductors CS5326. Delta Sigma ADC’s represent another brand new concept that is now standard. By this time we had lost our obsession with secrecy and we no longer ground the top off of chips to hide our choices.
I remember that a standard interview question for the tech team was “What does an LS138 do?” Brad Cox remembers “this was a time when people could seriously innovate hardware without a huge company behind them. It was kind of the tail end of that era. The main reason I took the job at Hybrid was that when you guys showed me the boards I’d be working on, I saw all that TTL 7400-series stuff and said to myself ‘Wow. This will possibly be the last opportunity I have to exploit my knowledge of this stuff…’”
Modified Mega4 ST's and SMPTE Chase-Lock
In order to sell ADAP's into a professional production environment Hybrid found it necessary to remove the beige plastic case of the Atari and instead package it in a matching rack box. And in order to lock most accurately against SMPTE time code the engineers designed a SMPTE Mate II which mounted as a duaghter card to the Mega ST and provided a "master clock".
ADAP II in Production
I have to credit James Wilkinson as the founder of the Atari ST Musicians Network on Facebook for inspiring this history. He contacted me after purchasing an ADAP II back in 2015. James has a mid production ADAP II, shown above and sporting serial number 373. I think the serial numbers eventually topped 500. The arrangement in the picture is the classic "Sound Cube", but without the metal rack box. These systems were packaged in a metal rack box approximately cubic. One of the sales guys at Hybrid, Chaz Silviria, referred to his, on wheels, as "the drunk chick". He told of having to push and pull "the drunk fat chick" along on sales calls in New York City. The Hybrid sales guys were not a PC bunch.
The power switch on the "SOUNDRACK" (analog board) identifies it as an early rev of the ADAP II analog board, still packaged in the ADAP I box. The later ADAP II analog box was as deep as the digital box and the "SOUNDRACK" moniker was gone. The analog board is beneath the two Lynex in the picture. Next is an Atari Mega 4 ST in the Hybrid rack box. Then you see the ADAP II digital box. And the big box on the bottom held hard disk(s) with an Atari DMA adapter by ICD in the back. Many of these hard disk boxes went out with Seagate ST277 (77MB) drives. Others went out with Priam 380's. I also remember Hitachi 380's.
The grey board is the first C25 based ADAP II prototype board. It was big. The red board is a very early still functioning prototype of ADAP II. It boots up and apparently plays but it doesn't record. Something is wrong in the serial digital audio circuit. Interestingly, that's where all of the yellow wires are. Unfortunately I no longer have ADAP II schematics. The red board doesn’t show a version number or date. Revisions of the board were made as the audio clocking got more sophisticated to support digital IO. Rev 2.4 adds support for digital IO. Such boards were typically shipped with digital IO daughter cards.
“My” ADAP II carries serial number 225 and contains digital board rev 2.2.
James' system carries serial number 373 and the digital board is marked version 2.4. Amazingly, it has the "hand connected ground wires". I recently reminisced with Brad Cox who applied the wires. After we had figured out the proper circuits, it was my job to spin the PCB. We used Orcad and Pads PCB. Somehow or other the Vdd pins of all of the IC's managed to be disconnected. When Brad discovered this while trying to bring up the new board he came into my office and said "Are you sitting down?" That legendary phrase ended up on the later digital IO boards. Brad probably hand wired 20 boards for shipping before we got a new board spin in house. Brad says “- I was talking to you on the phone when I asked if you were sitting down, but it is kind of funny to imagine that I walked in to your office and asked that question…”
ADAP II in Operation
Below is my ADAP II "portable". Darryl Robinson, one of Hybrid's master technicians, left it with me at one point. This was a prototype of Digital Master. The analog board was added inside of the ADAP chassis. The Mega4ST is repackaged in the Hybrid chassis. A SmpteMate II is also inside of the Mega chassis. I have a new SD drive from James, but I haven't connected it yet. At one point this portable ADAP II was demonstrated with a Stacy. The portables contain digital board version 2.2. Old stock? Refurb? My Digital Master contains a digital board version 2.5. I can’t name a functional difference between any of these versions of the digital boards. I suspect there might have been some changes in clock routing to support slaving to digital IO.
ADAP II analog boards also have versions. The latest ones show version 2.7, March 18, 1991. I also have several showing version 2.6, May 8, 1990. I have an early prototype tagged version 2.2, December 16, 1989. I remember the CS5326 ADC being prone to “idle tones”, a quiet whining noise audible when the input was silent. We were advised that grounding arrangements could affect this. The various PCB spins evolved the grounding and decoupling. I don’t think the noise ever quite went away.
The DRE release notes remind me that the SmpteMate II implemented “chase lock” by generating a master audio clock. This made its SMPTE time code lock quite accurate.
Above are three pictures of the inside of a "portable" ADAP II. The inside of a Digital Master is organized similarly, though the 3RU form factor made room for a 213MB Maxtor hard disk. The green daughter board in the digital box is a combined SMPTEmate plus digital IO adapter. With this adapter board the ADAP could back up the sound file system to a DAT drive over an SPDIF link.
Rather than separate tabs in one program, ADAP II came with a collection of programs. The "DRE" (Digital Recorder and Editor) was the flagship non-destructive hard disk editor. Paul Hershenson wrote the basis, the SoundFileSystem (SFS). This innovative approach could address up to a gigabyte in the era when the largest hard disk we had ever seen was 760MB. If only we had patented it... I remember discussing whether we would have to take the rotational time of hard disks into account. Hard disks got faster, and we did not have to. The big box at the bottom of James stack held the hard disk. It could hold two full size 380MByte Priam drives. They sounded like a jet taking off.
It was a big deal when we added "scrubbing" by moving the mouse. I wrote something like an 8 point sinc interpolation filter. But the ADAP's analog board had such strong bass that we blew some speakers with the low frequencies. I think we used a smaller coupling cap after that.
Later in the project I wrote the "TimePage" which ended up using time domain time compression. I wrote the whole frequency domain phase vocoder but no one liked how it sounded.
Several names show up in this list who haven't yet been mentioned. Deric Lubin was one of the higher level C programmers. Paulo Raffaelli was another. At one point the two of them occupied adjacent glass cubes in the "new" Hybrid office on National Blvd. I hesitate to call them UI programmers, though they certainly did that. They also did whatever was necessary in the audio code. We had no formal source code control. We had no formal bug tracking system. The DRE release notes (see READ_DRE.304) discusses bugs open and fixed but there are no numbers. I don't remember any written list.
David Reisner wrote the low level DSP and 68000 assembly language code used by the hard disk recorder. Like Paul, he came out of UCSD's "CARL" program. I fondly remember a weekend spent hanging out at David's parents’ house with Rick Oliver and an 8 channel logic analyzer trying to capture and fix some bug in the playback routines that would manifest after hours of testing.
Chez Bridges was a key guy in Hybrid's marketing department. He sadly passed away before the '90's were out. Robert Drury was a DSP expert. I don't think we used all of what he could have taught us. We hired David Simpao fresh out of college.
I remember Jeff Sandler as a beta tester who offered much wise advice about the use of the system in film production. It's interesting to say more about the beta test program. We had an old Compaq in the office with a dial up modem running BBS software and a huge amount of discussion went on there. Those old logs would be very interesting had anyone saved them.
Tony Lee was another critical person on the team. Tony left Hybrid to open a shop catering to Atari owners. That lasted a few years, and all of Hybrid's local users knew that they could get reliable service from Tony. Tony was mostly responsible for the Hybrid packaging of the Mega 4ST's.
Digital Master
The Digital Master was a repackaging of ADAP II. It was produced primarily to sell into Guitar Center. Like the "portable", it all fit in one box. It also had space to put a hard disk inside. It was sold with a Maxtor 213. I think it had room for two of them. While the SFS could take up as much disk as you had, the Atari FAT16 file system only allowed partitions up to 16M!
Software Versions
You can see from the screen shots here that the last ADAP I version was 1.50. I don't have any other versions.
You can download ADAP I v1.50 here.
The last ADAP II version I was involved with was labeled 3.03 in the about box and 3.04 on the disks. The release notes from v3.04 begin with this text:
DRE Release Notes - 01/22/92 (Release Status)
Installation:
Copy DRE304.PRG into your DIG_MSTR (or ADAP_II) folder.
Copy the resource into the OBJECT folder.
Go!
Those release notes are 459 lines long and describe changes going back to "2.42A". I attach the complete note at the end of this document. There's a lot of history in those notes. A key item is the note that a HUGE important data loss bug was fixed in 2.45. Don't use an earlier version of DRE!
You can download the ADAP II software here in two links.
EDIT, CUE and MIDI matching 3.04
ADAP always shipped with a user manual. A couple of photos follow. PDF copies of this are available among the user community. The Digital Master User Manual is the final and definitive version of the manual. Looking back at it 30 years later, I’m impressed at how well we documented things.
Here's a PDF of the user guide
I wrote this text file describing the software.
5/3/2015Find attached two LZH files that together make up the Digital Master 3.04 software release, complete with installers. This is the last one Darryl left me. I used the also attached lha310.tos to compress the half dozen folders, each one representing an install disk. I found lha310 on line. I am using a double density disk formatted as 720k on a PC to (slowly) transfer data between my Mega4 and the PC. You should be able to unpack these and install.I remember 2 major categories of users of ADAP.1) Film and video sound guys. These guys worked with libraries of short sounds and tweaked them to drop them in as sound effects. ADAP's ability to use SMPTE time code was key. Do you have a SMPTEmate?2) Music production guys. They liked the retuning features in the edit page, and later timepage. And as a stereo recorder with reasonable editing ability, it was a natural for the final master.adapdiag.st:Find attached an ADAP diagnostics disk copied via omniflop.I suspect that when you get to it we should do a skype session. I doubt the diagnostics are self explanatory, but if I'm running them in parallel on my machine we can make some progress. I saw programs to test memory, the two DSP,s and communication among others.ADAP1:The ADAP 1 software came on two floppies, labeled "color" and "mono". The program is identical on the two disks, but the screens folder contain .pc2 or .pc3 files. Add them all together and it's a bit too large for one floppy. I copied the mono disk onto a floppy, transferred it to my PC, then copied the color screen files. On the PC, all of the screen files are in one directory. Then I zipped it using 7zip.If you need to put it back onto a floppy, you need to delete either the .pc2 or the .pc3 screen files.We also produced a programmer’s guide and service kit. I have an ADAP I programmer’s guide but I no longer have my ADAP II programmer’s guide. I no longer have a copy of ADAP II schematics. This is a big loss. Similarly I no longer have copies of the software sources. This is the biggest loss.
ADAP Users
A few words about ADAP users. Scott Martin Gershin (see his IMDB entry) was a big user at SoundDeluxe. He did a promo video for Atari. He used ADAP II to do the sound effects for "JFK", "Born on the Fourth of July", and "The Doors" and others. The movie “The Doors” led to Robby Krieger of the Doors playing in the Hybrid Arts booth at NAMM. It must have been 1992. Here's a pretty good article about that time.
Joel Valentine used ADAP to create his sound effects library. One of his disks is in the picture above. Chester Stout remembers he had more hard disks connected to his ADAP than anyone. The folks doing The Simpsons (was that at Glenn Glenn? Or Todd-AO?) used ADAPs. I have a gold record from "L.A. Guns". I traded it for an early copy of the "TimePage".
Hybrid was closely tied to a company we called “Hybrid Germany”. Rainer Poertner was the CEO of Hybrid (USA) after the early days. He was closely connected to Hybrid Germany. The German team was in the center of the European market for all things Atari and they served as a focal point for knowledge. I visited them once or twice.
Paul Carlson was another ADAP sales guy. He was very laid back California. He told me the story of the Blue Bus that’s “calling us” in The Doors “The End”. One Saturday morning, as I remember it, Paul was called in to give a demo to a German gentleman, possibly a principal at Dynacord. Being early in the morning, a somewhat scruffy Paul greeted him with “Dude!” The gentleman responded with “That’s Mr. Dude to you.” Paul is also credited with getting ADAP involved in Nirvana’s Never Mind album. Paul says
I am the engineer who tuned Rodney Dangerfield's voice on "I'll never do it on a Christmas Tree", the theme song for "Rover Dangerfield", on the ADAPII. I also tuned Kurt Cobain's voice by ear on the song "Lithium" and created Kurt's guitar and the Cello track on "Something's in the way" on the ADAPII. The digital to analog lay-back on those songs was also handled by the Adap II as well.
You can find YouTube clips of Butch Vig talking about recording Nirvana’s “Something in the way”. In a forum on GearSlutz in 2009, Butch Vig said this about using ADAP:
We overdubbed everything in Studio B, drums, bass, back vocals, and the cello was last.
FYI: I rented some sort of digital editing system to tighten the tracks up, this was before Pro Tools. I think the system was called an ADAP? Ring any bells anyone?
It was a pain in the ass to use!
The Digital Master Users Manual lists a few others. John Purdell produced the “LA Guns” album. Norman Kasow did sound for some classic films. Mark Gheen was in Texas. I remember him doing a very long live recording. Michael Obst was our key guy in Paris. I spent a very enjoyable few days with him in Paris once.
ADAP IV
This is an ADAP IV (DM-EX) prototype. Notice that it has a controlled impedance connector in the upper right. The idea was to make the cartridge connection longer. There was a small box that plugged into the cartridge port and an expensive cable that ran to the ADAP IV. I also worked on fancy VU meters for the analog board. The ADAP IV board also included digital IO and SMPTEmate.
Before the integrated board we tried to make an expander board for ADAP II and we used this for development.
Brad Cox took the DM-EX to the Hamburg Music Meese in 1992. Brad remembers:
I’ll have to think about the Musicmesse, my memories of that are weak. I remember Brad Eisenhauer put together a really cool demo with a John F Kennedy speech over some music, and I was playing that over and over as a demo. I remember Chez being there too, because we had dinner together at the hotel and that was when I got to know him. I remember being delighted that he was a hard core Devo fan. Had Hefeweizen with Raspberry syrup…
One morning it was really cold, and when we were leaving the hotel there were these insane “ice clouds” rolling through the driveway, they were like huge fractals! Some like a foot across, some like three or four. There were several people there and every single one said they had never seen anything like it.
There was a guy that worked for Hybrid Germany that was sort of my guide, he kept apologizing for his rather excellent English and at some point told me that he hadn’t spoken English in eight or ten years in grade school…. The president of HA Germany had a BMW and we got over 150 miles an hour on the autobahn (yes it was some number of KPH…).
HA Germany had their own version of the rack mounted Atari Mega, it had green lines instead of blue on the front panel.
Hybrid Arts Deutschland GmbH: 6230 Frankfurt 80, Lindenscheidstrassel
Thanks to Brad Eisenhaure, here is a brochure for the DM-EX.
The End
The ADAP IV / DM-EX didn’t have long to live. I’ve only seen one picture of a still existing DM-EX on the web. Hybrid was collapsed into Digital F/X, a holding company constructed by T Rowe Price to hold the remains of Hybrid and WaveFrame. The remaining engineers went on to good and interesting work in audio and music.
Hybrid collapsed like many start-ups. It’s a credit to the team that it was able to last so long. Hybrid always had two sides. The “MIDI” side, starting on the 130XE and built around Stefan Daystrom’s “SmpteTrack” also included excellent work by Tom Bajoras, Jon Eidsvoog and others on GenPatch and GenEdit. I remember fascinating discussions about how to produce a score from a MIDI file. I was much more involved in the ADAP side, though the two came closer together toward the end. The management at Hybrid brought in external financing, but the employees were all becoming disillusioned with where things were going. There just wasn’t money to pay everyone. Since the actual engineers didn’t have any ownership stake there was no good reason to keep it going.
The last ADAP II software version is dated January 22, 1992. The DM-EX brochure dates from March. I left Hybrid in April of 1992. I left LA a day before the Rodney King riots. The Federated store just up the street from Hybrid’s office was looted and burned. Darryl has some wild stories about protecting Hybrid gear that night.
Fortunately, I've held on to my own collection of ADAP gear. Though I'd love to get a DM-EX!