From PCs to Audio: Before shifting gears to pursue his passion and love of audio recording, Millennia Music & Media Systems Founder John La Grou launched his career as a start-up member of Multi-Tech Computer, managing the OEM PC Group, which in three years grew to be the world’s largest PC provider; the name was later changed to Acer America. He started an acoustic music production company in Northern California in 1990, recording mostly classical music with the Sacramento Symphony, chamber orchestras, recitals, acoustic jazz, and the occasional studio session. He applied his engineering background at Cal Poly to designing a more musically accurate microphone pre amp for his classical work. After two years of development, he had built 24 channels for himself and was making the best recordings of his life. An opportunity to build eight channels for the San Francisco Symphony turned Millennia from a personal project into a business. Since those first garage-built units, the company has shipped over 50,000 channels to the most discriminating clients in critical acoustic music production, including virtually every major symphony orchestra, most major film scoring stages, sampler companies, many ADR and Foley stages, major live touring events, and countless acoustic-music-focused studios. The HV-3 line of mic-amps continues to be their No. 1 selling product worldwide.
Millennia Flagship Products: The company’s most popular products are the HV-3C, HV-3D, and STT-1 “Origin.” The HV-3C (2 ch) and HV-3D (8 ch) use their most advanced “double-balanced” mic preamp architecture, with 23dBu of unpadded input headroom, 32dBu output, theoretical-low noise, vanishing distortion, near-zero phase shift, and exceptional common-mode rejection. The STT-1 is their “all-in-one” recording channel/analog front-end. Their NSEQ and TCL “Twin Topology” parametric equalizer and compressor are mainstays of mastering labs and mixing rooms—they've also been duplicated in plug-ins from Brainworx, selling over 100,000 copies. So they took their NSEQ, TCL, and HV-3 and put them in a single recording channel, called the STT-1 Origin.
New Products: Millennia’s newest product is the HV-316. The 316 is 16 channels of HV-3 remote (PC or Mac Ethernet controlled) microphone preamplifiers in a 1U road-hardened chassis. The HV-316 is their most advanced mic preamp to-date. DANTE is standard, MADI and analog outputs are optional. It’s compatible with Yamaha R-Remote and Avid PRE remote protocols. La Grou has also been working for 10 years on a radically new advance in audio architecture. The technology is called multi-path. “We’re advancing the state of the art in digital to analog conversion by a factor of 100 times,” he says. For more information, visit imersiv.com and sign-up for the newsletter.
Quote from John La Grou: “My design philosophy is rooted in the quest for musical and atmospheric purity in classical music, acoustic jazz, and all critical ‘real space’ recording.”
Contact Millennia Music and Media Systems, 530-647-0750
