Shen Milsom & Wilke Hong Kong founding

Shen Milsom & Wilke Hong Kong- How it got established

By Ward Sellars

December 2021

Note: SM&W-HK has been successful due to the amazing talents and hardwork of people that came after me. At most, I just acted as a catalyst so that those people could shine and do their best work. We always must acknowledge the foresight and brilliance of Fred Shen, as he was the one who really founded this office.

Arrival in HK – Preamble to Consulting work, Campbell & Shillinglaw – 1980 to 1985

I arrived in HK in the middle of 1980, to work for a Film Production Company as a Sound Man. The job only lasted a year after which I went freelance. I met Andrew Shillinglaw and Ian Campbell in the middle of 1981 at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, where I was available to crew on local sailing boats for Saturday afternoon races in the harbour. I wasn't a great sailor but I enjoyed it and I was energetic. I had put my name up on the bulletin board at the Club to crew for folks. Ian called me out of the blue and asked if I could come the following Saturday for a practice race. I didn’t know him from Adam at the time. We would race on his 25ft keel boat, which was part of a class called “Quarter Tonner”. This was a handicap race with many sizes of boats. We finished in the middle of the pack, just beaten to the line by his partner in crime, Dr. Andrew Shillinglaw. After the race, Ian introduced me to Andrew and as we had a few beers at the bar, they asked what I did. I told them about my film and television work and my career in the Industry in Britain, Europe and Africa. They said they could probably use my skills on a current project they had for the Brunei Broadcasting Company for a new studio complex in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. What I brought to the table was experience with recent TV production techniques, where smaller EFP electronic camera’s and semi portable recorders were being taken into the field and used to shoot television episodes like film, a single camera at a time. This technology change has a big impact on studio design, as more space is needed for editing rooms and post-production. Up until that point, TV studio’s were designed around multi-camera shooting on large sound stages. I helped C&S with this assignment, which they did pay me for, but the bulk of my payment was in training by these two men in construction techniques, especially around acoustics.

As some in the audience know, Ian and Andrew both taught at Hong Kong University (HKU) in the Architecture Dept. Ian was a Scottish Canadian Architect and Andrew was a PhD Mechanical “Building Services” Engineer, specializing in building envelope thermal issues. Both had skills and experience in Architectural and Mechanical acoustics. Ian had emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the early 60’s to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a radio and TV Studio Architect. He worked on over 30 small and large facilities across the country. At some point in the  late 60’s, the CBC was approached by the Malaysian Government for a Studio Architect to assist in the development of a new Studio Complex in Kuala Lumpur. Ian was seconded to the Malaysian Broadcasting Corporation from the CBC, for a 2 year stint. Ian loved Malaysia and SE Asia so much, that at the end of the two year contract, he didn’t want to return to Canada, instead looking around Asia for a new gig. HKU was looking for new staff, so he snapped up their offer. Andrew started at HKU as a Building Services lecturer in 1977, and joined Ian Campbell in a Professional Practice of Acoustics, based out of their HKU offices. Campbell and Shillinglaw was born, later to be joined by Leslie Lau.

I worked sporadically for C&S for a few years, always as a freelancer. They didn’t have enough work for me as a full-time position. In 1983, I started a full time job with Kam Production Studio’s (KPS) as Assistant to the Managing Director, at their offices in Causeway Bay. This was a company setting up a Home Video sale and rental business, revolving around Chinese Kung Fu movies that we had bought or licensed. I was hired to sell Chinese movie rights to overseas territories and to help set up Video rental shops in HK. But my primary role was to plan and build a small Production house in Kowloon Tong. We converted two New Territories houses into one larger facility, about 5000 sq feet in total. We had PAL and NTSC C-Format 1” recorders, PAL and NTSC U-Matics, a big VHS and Beta duplication bay, a Rank Cintel Telecine, a small shooting stage of about 1000 sq.ft, and a Master control room with all Ampex cameras and switching equipment. We even had a digital Standards Converter, which was very costly at the time. I also built an audio post studio, with a 32 track Soundcraft console and a 24 track Studer recorder time-code synced to a U-matic Video recorder, so that we could do rock-and-roll mixing and editing. The Audio studio was small at about 250 sq ft, but it was big enough to record jingles or a small group. Primarily we used the studio for audio post work on in-house and external projects.

I was in a position to hire C&S as acoustical consultants for the studio, and I learned a lot about how consultants work and how to detail construction for acoustical purposes. All the TV Studio’s (RTHK, TVB, ATV) were in the Kowloon Tong area, even though we were all under the Kai Tak flight path. We wanted the shooting stage to be NC 20, but the best we could do was NC-30 with the MVAC & the airplanes overhead. The small audio studio target was NC-15, but the best we could do was NC-25 and even that was very difficult as it was on the top floor of the building . We used audio techniques like close miking, noise gates and downward expanders to increase the available dynamic range. It was during the design and construction of this studio that I met and became friends with David Burgess of Audio Consultants Company Ltd. (ACCL) He was the dealer that sold us all of the audio equipment for the studio.

Independent Acoustical and Sound System Consulting Work, Teaching – 1985 and 1986

I left KPS in 1985 when they were starting to have financial difficulties. C&S offered me a freelance gig to do the Sound System/Audio design (Electro-Acoustics) for the new Garden Hotel in Guangzhou. See my on-line blog about this here. They had been using Jacek Figwer out of the States for their electro-acoustic design work, but they felt I would be just as good (and cheaper). Jacek had been the Sound System design guy for Bolt Beranek and Newman in Boston (now Acentech), before setting up his own practice. I looked through some of his sound reinforcement designs, and although solid, I thought they were pretty old-fashioned. I did the research on products via trade magazines, hard copy brochures (nothing on-line yet) and via the sound system products sold at ACCL and its competitors. This often meant getting on a bus or the newly opened MTR to visit showrooms and see the actual gear first hand. Sometimes I would call the manufacturers in the UK or the US and get them to mail me information or occasionally a fax (remember them?). When I was at ACCL reviewing their line of Electro-Voice and Altec Lansing products, I was intrigued by a draftsman using a program called AutoCAD, outputting onto a pen plotter. I think this was AutoCAD 2.1, running under DOS. I asked Dave Burgess if I could hire this guy to draft up my one-line schematics for the Garden Hotel. He said he could make him available for free if I spec’d EV and other ACCL products! That was a good deal, because EV and Altec were a great line of products at that time, and I was likely to use them anyway.

It was during this time that Andrew and Ian got me to stand in for them in some of their classes at HKU, as they were always travelling for their private practice. I had picked up enough formal acoustics knowledge and read voraciously, so that I could teach some classes in Noise Control to Architecture and Building Services engineering students. My preferred textbook that I used for the courses was Parkin, Humpreys and Cowell, “Acoustics, Noise and Buildings”. This inexpensive paper back is technical enough to be a textbook, but it is well written and accessible by almost any level of student. This excellent book has been out of print for some time. I ended up teaching two terms of students and was even an examiner.

The big difference between my sound reinforcement designs and Jacek’s was in the use of Automatic Microphone Mixers and balanced audio interconnections without transformers. Jacek’s designs used big console analogue audio mixers and transformers everywhere. Although I do use audio transformers in some circumstances (nod to Bill Whitlock), if attention to proper grounding and balanced shielded operation is maintained in a fixed domain facility, the chances of spurious noise induced into the system is pretty limited. Direct balanced coupling of low-Z outputs to hi-Z inputs will provide the best transient response – better than with transformers. I would also use 600W amplifiers, which have a direct peak to peak voltage swing of 70V, so that we can couple these directly to a 70V line, without an output transformer on the Amp. If we needed more distance, we would use a 1,200W amp, coupled into a 100V line, again without transformers. Transformers on the outputs of amplifiers are big, heavy and most importantly, they rob the system of low Hz transients. Things are much simpler now when we go straight to digital at the mic XLR jack, or even right in the mic, with Dante output from the Mic on an RJ-45.

Although I did use a modest size console mixer for the Hotel large divisible Ballroom (about 15,000 sq.ft), the primary microphone control was with the Altec Automixer’s, which had been patented by Dan Duggan and licensed to Altec. These were a gain sharing design that worked reasonably well . Even today, the Duggan Automixers, in software, are the best mixing algorithms’ on the market and much imitated. The next best Automixer algorithm in my view is the Bob Ponto patent, that IED used.

Jockey Club, Peter Barnett and large Computer controlled sound systems – 1986-1989

After the Garden Hotel project finished in early 1986, Dave Burgess introduced me to Peter Barnett of AMS Acoustics. Peter had a contract with the Jockey Club for the complete overhaul of the Happy Valley PA system. Peter was based in the UK and travelled to HK from time to time, but he needed someone on the ground. So he hired me, initially on an hourly freelance basis, and then later full-time. Peter was an expert in Intelligibility, and he had written numerous papers on the topic for the Institute of Acoustics in the UK. He had made an outrageous claim to the Jockey Club that he could design a PA system that could deliver totally intelligible live race commentary to every one of the 45, 000 punters as they were screaming for their favourite horse. Because of his Academic and Mathematical credentials, the Jockey Club took him up on his challenge and gave him a contract to totally replace the sound systems at Happy Valley. I came into the project when he was about 60% finished with the design, and initially I performed lots of in-situ SPL tests at many different parts of the Happy Valley track during race meetings. We found that there was about a 20dBA difference in the ambient SPL from the beginning of the race to the end of the race. The members private boxes didn’t vary that much, about 12dBA, but the public stands became very raucous during the races. So we knew that we needed a system that would automatically adjust the SPL level to always be 10dB above the ambient and rise and fall as the ambient changes. Since different areas had different minima and maxima, we also knew that we needed many zones of sensors. In the end, we ended up with 3000 speakers, 160 speaker zones, and 40 different sensor locations. Everything had to be hands off, controlled via sensors and algorithms, with separate routing for English and Cantonese race commentary. This was absolutely revolutionary for 1986, where everything ran under DOS! At the time, in 1986, there was only one manufacturer that had this capability and that was IED. The project at Happy Valley was installed by ACCL during the summer 1986 closed season and was operational in September when racing started again. We needed to be on hand for multiple Wednesday night race meetings to attend to anomalies, and to re-program parts of the system that didn’t work exactly as we had expected. By December of 1986, the system was deemed to be stable and we did final hand-off. The Club loved the audio performance and it delivered on Peter’s promise, Intelligibility everywhere.

Immediately the Jockey Club signed up Peter for a complete revamp of the Sound System at ShaTin, and I came along for the ride. This IED system was even larger, almost 5000 speakers, 185 output zones (each with a 1,200W amplifier driving 100V lines).Although ShaTin is larger than Happy Valley, at 90,000 patrons, it needed fewer sensor locations as there weren’t so many small spaces like at Happy Valley. We had 30 sensor locations in ShaTin. This system was designed over the 1987/88 winter and was installed by ACCL again in the summer closed season of 1988. It was commissioned in September of 1988.

Peter Barnett was a typical Type A personality, hard driving, hard drinking, overweight, smoker, so his health was not that good, especially his heart. There were periods of time when he couldn’t travel to HK and I was handling everything, along with a couple of dedicated commissioning guys we hired. Peter gained another contract for the Macau Jockey club in 1987, which we started before ShaTin was finished. Macau races through the summer so the stands are enclosed and air-conditioned, with lots of glass – a very difficult situation due to the acoustical reflections off the glass. But this project was easier as it is much smaller than either Happy Valley or ShaTin. However, we needed to handle 4 languages simultaneously – English, Cantonese, Portuguese and Mandarin. We used the IED digital stacker to schedule announcements in public areas. In the private boxes, the punters could select which language they wanted to listen to. Late in 1988 during the Macau Installation, Peter had a massive heart attack while he was in HK, and he almost died on the operating table. He had a quadruple bypass at Mathilda Hospital in Hong Kong. Although he slowly recovered, I could see that I could not pin my future on this guy, so I needed to find another job.

Relocating to the US - 1988?

Earlier in 1988, I was already considering moving back to the US. I had by this time been living outside the US for 14 years. I put together a 100 page CV, complete with drawings, calculations and reports. I sent it out by mail to 20 different Acoustics/AV consulting firms in the US, with the intention on visiting these firms in the summer of 1988. The list was all the big names in the Consulting field, like Salter Associates and Paoletti in San Francisco, Veneklausen in LA, Towne Richards in Seattle, Bolt Beranek in Boston, Joiner Rose in Dallas, Kirkegaard in Chicago and many others. I actually got replies from ten of these firms that they would like to meet me. In the summer of 1988, I flew to the USA and visited 8 cities where consultants were based, seeing 12 firms in total. Although I had interviews at 2 firms in NYC, I didn’t know about Shen at this time as they were pretty small. So I left the states without meeting Fred, Dennis and Hubert Wilke. I got two job offers out of that trip, but I was not sold on either of them. After I got back to HK, I found out about SM&W and sent my CV to them. 2 weeks later I got a call from Fred. I told him about my recent trip to the states and that I was considering coming back to the US.

Fred had another plan for me.

He said that he had long thought about opening an office in Hong Kong, where he had gone to school, but he didn’t know anyone that could manage a new office like that. So he said he would like to meet me. He sent me a ticket to NYC and I flew back there for 4 days near the end of 1988. It was a whirlwind trip, meeting all of the then 20 employees and partners. They made me an offer to stay in Hong Kong and it was a good offer and a good plan. So we shook hands and parted. I told them that I had multiple existing commitments in HK and could not start full time with them until the end of 1989, about 1 year later. In the meantime, I would work on a hourly basis to get the office organized. They printed name cards for me and I followed up for them on some existing projects in HK, like at the IM Pei Bank of China building. I also made some trips to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to meet with potential clients during this time.

Transition to SM&W – 1988 & 1989.

In late 1988, I took a lease on a small office/residential space at 46 Graham Street in Central, near Hollywood Road. This space had been purchased by a friend of mine as an investment. We knocked a few flimsy walls down to make one large open space of about 500 sq.ft. We built some movable acoustical panels about 5 ft high as cubicle barriers, with work space for 5 people, plus office equipment, a small kitchen and bathroom . This became the first office for SM&W in HK.

In the summer of 1989, I had a business class ticket around the world, on United and British Airways (they were partners then). I would go to Seattle, then LA, then NYC, then London, then Paris and lastly Delhi before returning to HK. I had business in all these places, but Paris was primarily a personal visit as my mother was living there at the time. But because I was going to be in Paris, Fred wanted me to check out the Ritz Hotel, stay one night and find out everything I could about the room controls that were installed there. SM&W-NYC was then working on the Hotel de las Arts in Barcelona, an SOM hotel being built for the 1992 Olympic games. The owner of that Barcelona property loved the room controls at the Ritz and he said to Fred “I want something like that in my property”. So I stayed at the cheapest room ($450/night, which is like $1200/night today) and took apart the bedside control panel to see how it was made. Like most things French, it was a beautiful custom job that would be difficult to replicate. I did visit the manufacturer in the suburbs of Paris and tried out my imperfect French with them, but it was not the right solution for the Barcelona hotel. It ended up Crestron (surprise), not as beautiful but more reliable.

It was during this trip that I had two other memorable experiences. While I was visiting relatives in Seattle, I made a side trip to Vancouver BC to spend time with Charlie Richmond of Richmond Sound Design. Charlie was (and still is) a theatre sound guy. But he had developed an intriguing audio automation system that he was just starting to sell to Theme parks. My visit there was to try to get him interested in developing a competitor product to IED. Although we had been successful with three mammoth installations of IED, we knew they needed competition to keep them innovating and to have some other options. Charlie knew a lot about the IED system, but he said he just could not devote the resources to compete with them. He was happy to stay in his Midi Show Control/Theatre automation niche. Today he has a powerful audio automation server that is entirely software based. In many ways it pre-dated the QSYS software based DSP, but it is time-line and cue based, which is what you need for Theatre and Theme Parks.

The other memorable experience was related to flying. When I arrived at JFK to board my flight to London, the BA gate agent looked horrified and said that I had been bumped off the flight. She could also see in her computer record that I had twice re-confirmed the flight. They realized that this was their mistake, so she offered me an alternative upgrade flight at their expense – on Concorde. So I got the ultimate upgrade that isn’t available any longer. My seat mate was Gordon Richardson, the Governor of the Bank of England, whose name was on all the Pound notes. Flying across the Atlantic at 70,000 ft at Mach 2 was an incredible experience.

Finally, at the end of 1989, I had wrapped up all my non-SM&W commitments and was ready for the roller coaster ride of my life. In early January of 1990, Fred sent me to NYC for a 3 month stay to absorb the SM&W way of doing things. He put me up in a nice bachelor apartment about 20 minutes walk from the SM&W office, then at 39th street, between Park and 5th Avenue. I was employee number 21. Tommy was 15 years old and he would come into the office from time to time and shout to Irene “Mom, where are my gloves” or some other kid thing. They threw me into projects immediately, including Sound System schematic design for the new Denver International Airport. I absorbed a lot of lessons from the senior staff there at that time, especially from Ben Houghton and Jim Merrill on the Acoustics side and John Campanella for AV.

After that 3 months, I returned to Hong Kong to begin 13 years of non-stop work at SM&W HK and then in SF at SM&W-SF.

I hope to read the amazing stories of current and former SM&W-HK staff, to see where they have ventured and succeeded.