"Once you hear this, you won’t be able to go back." JH Audio's Jerry Harvey on revolutionary new Pearl processor & Ruby IEM

JH Audio launches groundbreaking Pearl processor and Ruby IEM as the manufacturer makes a huge play to become a technology company as well as in-ear innovator…

It’s no secret that JH Audio sits firmly at the top of the table when it comes to manufacturing in-ear monitors, but now the company has launched a mind-bending new matched product pairing, which could change the way people approach in-ear monitoring for good.

Headliner sits down with JH Audio founder and IEM pioneer, Jerry Harvey, as he explains why Pearl, a tri-amp micro speaker management system, and Ruby, a super-compact new in-ear, will take the manufacturer into new waters, as well as give longer life to engineers’ careers.

“This is something I’ve been wanting to make since 1995, when I first started doing this,” opens Harvey, with a smile. It was in ’95, of course, that he created the first multi-driver earpiece while at Ultimate Ears - the UE5 - and it’s been innovation after innovation ever since.

When Harvey left Ultimate Ears to launch JH Audio in 2007, he strived to make improvements on every element of the IEM experience, from sonics to comfort, creating universal and custom earpieces made by professionals, for professionals, that could do the job on another level.

Some of the standout shifts in gear included upping the ante from 2-way to 3-way pieces, 6-driver to 12-driver, and state-of-the-art 3D modelling — and as time has gone on, more benchmarks have been set, making JH Audio the leader in its field today.

This new shift with Pearl, however, takes the manufacturer into new territory — JH Audio is becoming a technology company, not just an IEM company.

“Going forward, it’s not about how many drivers you can put in a plastic shell, it’s about using fewer drivers, making smaller earpieces and having more control over the frequency response of the earphone itself,” Harvey explains. “I always knew that passive crossover earpieces were a compromise on how well you could do things — it just took 30 years of technology improvements, processors getting smaller, and batteries getting more powerful, to allow us to actually miniaturise what they’ve been doing in large-format PA systems for years.”

And that’s what Pearl does. Alongside this three-amp micro speaker processor is JH Audio’s latest in-ear monitor, Ruby, which has been meticulously designed to work only with Pearl. This matched pair opens up a whole world of new possibilities and, according to Harvey, will suit three levels of customers: music professionals, sound engineers, and even the home recording fraternity.

“We had it out on over 70 shows with Mötley Crüe, from the prototype all the way to the finished product; it worked perfectly for those guys and allowed them to perform on a higher level,” Harvey says. 

“Not only can you customise the equalisation for each individual [using Pearl], but because there are three amplifiers driving the [Ruby] earpiece and the DSP processing range, the earpiece has much more dynamic range and headroom than a single-amp out of a belt pack. Instead of 60-65 percent tuned, it’s now 100 percent tuned and 100 percent in phase. In fact, [Aerosmith guitarist] Brad Whitford says not only does it sound better, it’s larger than life — he says the stereo imaging is like nothing he has ever heard.”

Ruby has a passive crossover, but the active crossover in Pearl is essentially sweetening up the process in the earpiece.

“We do this is because we need to keep the low passes in the actual earpiece,” Harvey continues. “If we were to do a 100Hz low pass, the latency in the processing becomes too long to perform. It would be fine if you’re a studio guy as you don’t have a zero reference, but if you’re a drummer or singer, you have to have below 5ms of total latency in the chain; and the latency of the Pearl processor is six-tenths of a millisecond. We achieved that by not inducing any low passes or really low frequency low passes. From the console to the transmitter to the Pearl pack, it’s 1.7ms of latency total — so, way below 5ms.”

Ruby is now the smallest-footprint earpiece by some distance in the JH Audio inventory, yet still boasts four quad low, four quad mid, and four quad extended high frequency drivers. Harvey achieved this by putting all the components in time digitally, then delaying the components in the software between the low, mid and high drivers to make it phase coherent and in time — all thanks to the processing power within Pearl.

“With Pearl, you can create any frequency response from 10Hz to 20kHz. Let’s say you’re a touring engineer and you’re using virtual soundcheck to get a mix together for a PA system, or maybe a recording engineer trying to mix your tracks down — this is where Pearl really shines,” Harvey says. 

“With a click of a mouse, you can go from a perfectly flat earpiece to, for example, an Auratone tuning, a Yamaha NS10 curve, then on the live side you might want an L-Acoustics curve, a Clair Global Cohesion Curve — the possibilities are endless. You can sit in your hotel room or in the back lounge of a tour bus and mix things down that, when put into a PA system, actually translate.”

That is a seriously big ‘first’ — and it’s not the only one. Headliner asks Harvey to tell us more about the customisation of these individual earpieces, and Pearl’s ingenious ability to bring band members and crew members onto a completely level playing field of hearing reference.

This is not only extraordinary from a technology perspective, but it must also open up new levels of creativity and performance?

“Absolutely,” Harvey says. “Although the Aerosmith tour got cancelled, I walked in [to mix monitors during rehearsals] and made the band 100 percent happier than they’ve ever been with my mixes — and everyone on stage had a Pearl pack. I took audiograms for all of the people on stage, and we did corrective hearing curves for everyone — that included people with no hearing loss. 

"We created a curve for those who had noise-induced hearing loss from years of being on-stage. I also created one for myself, and for Travis White, who mixes Steven Tyler; it was an incredible feeling for all involved, and it worked amazingly.”

So, you’re essentially putting the hearing loss back in the curve?

“Yes, exactly — we start with a perfectly tuned earpiece, then we put roughly 20 percent of the hearing loss back in,” Harvey says. “I have found that to be the sweet spot when you run the belt pack up at performance level (92-98dB) as a hearing curve flattens out. Basically, if someone has loss of 50dB at 4 kHz, at the most I am only going to put 10dB back in; then I’ll write a +10dB file, a +8dB file, and a +6dB file with different degrees of compensation to see which sounds the sweetest to them.”

Game-changer is a very overused term, but…

“[laughs] Yeah, I already have two engineers — Travis White and Troy Milner — who say they’ll never mix monitors without a Pearl pack again,” Harvey smiles.

And on a personal level, what were the results of your audiogram?

“When I got my audiogram and I plugged this in, it was really amazing how detailed I could make my earpieces sound. Anyone who has been doing this for more than 10 or 15 years, is going to have some noise-induced hearing loss; it may be subtle, but there is stuff going on there.

“So, the next layer is the perfectly tuned earpiece along with the tools to shape it however they like. You can never ‘make’ bass response or high frequency extension or the tonality. This is the only tool that will take one earpiece and make it sound any way you want.”

Pearl can also be retrofitted to work with any JH Audio piece, but that’s a much more involved process. The user would physically need to go to one of the JH Audio offices or send the piece to the lab to get fully checked and tuned to the Pearl pack. “It’s an unknown quantity,” Harvey says, “but it can be done.”

So, this has been 14 years in the making, and sees JH Audio jumping firmly into the world of audio technology as a manufacturer. No small feat…

“[pauses] You know, I’d worked with four different companies on this between 2009 and 2020, but had never quite got it over the line. It was a conversation at the NAMM show three years ago with my good friend James Gordon (CEO of the Audiotonix Group); I told him we had this great product 90 percent there but just couldn’t get it finished. After listening to what we needed, in typical James fashion, he said, ‘We can do that for you;’ and he was right. Skip to the present day, and Audiotonix has helped us create a product that’s actually a viable solution that we can show to the world.”

Business, like life itself, is often about moments, and it’s no secret that the pro audio industry as a whole is still in recovery mode, post-pandemic. Does this ‘moment’ for JH Audio mean even more, all things considered?

“It’s a career achievement, for sure; but honestly, I think it’s just the start,” Harvey admits. “Over the next three to five years, people will come to understand that passively tuned earpieces are a severe compromise, and once you hear this, you won’t be able to go back. As you know, I developed the first multi-driver in-ear, all the way up to 12-driver, and everyone ran off and did that from that point on. But I had hit the end of speaker development and passive crossover development in IEMs, so this was the next logical step. Now I think we have opened Pandora's box; it’s a professional level for professional people, right?”

Harvey will be hosting masterclasses at Clair Global and at JH HQ from Oct 11, where engineers and system technicians will be taught how to tune the earpieces on the JH Audio ear simulator and smart rig.

“I genuinely believe that this will allow FOH, monitor and studio engineers to prolong their careers by doing hearing compensation curves,” he declares. “If you mix FOH for a band, imagine you pop in your earpieces and all of a sudden everything you’re doing through the PA system becomes very apparent. You gain a trust in the earpiece, and you realise that you basically mix on the earpiece because you open it up, and you don’t start adding high frequencies. It will definitely allow engineers who have been working in this industry for decades to extend their careers.”

The Pearl System will be available only in combination with the JH Audio Ruby IEMs; the full system is priced at $3,500, along with a custom bundle available by special order at $3,700. If the rental houses jump on Pearl — which is, of course, part of the plan — then the IEM world could very well be about to change for good. And wouldn’t that be something.

“It really would, but we have been the innovators of IEMs since 1995, and every breakthrough in the IEM world has come from Jerry Harvey Audio. So, people already have a great trust in us, and in our products,” Harvey reflects.

“It’s just that now, we’re not just an earpiece company, we’re moving into being a technology company - and that is very exciting. I believe we’re going to see convergence in the future where this all becomes one system: think early cell phones, the ones without cameras, and where mobile devices are today. The same thing is going to happen with this technology. It’ll take manufacturers five years, but it’ll all be in one belt pack; that is the trend I can see happening.”