Baltazar Hernandez was David Manley's first employee in
the first California VTL factory joining the production line on August 24, 1987. For many years Balta wired up
amplifiers. During the early '90's at the old VTL factory, Balta was
the Manley Pro division all by himself building each and every piece
of Manley recording gear (that was when Manley pro gear was a state
secret!). A specialist in prototype wiring, Balta was David's right
hand man. It was during these years he started learning the
philosophy of the master. When VTL and Manley split the companies in
1993, there was no question where Baltazar would go. He jumped in to
his new role as factory floor supervisor at the newly created Manley
Laboratories, Inc. training the new factory production team.
EveAnna put him in charge of finally
computerizing and maintaining the factory inventory, model parts
lists and costings.
One
Saturday afternoon, EveAnna and Baltazar were working on some things
when she walked by a half-built prototype of the 300B Preamplifier.
David had left it unfinished when he moved to France in early 1996. One of our
design techs at the time, Richard Schroeder, had designed most of this thing
and built a crazy prototype kinda glued together with resistors and capacitors flying in the sky,
this thing looked like a modern art sculpture. A light bulb (or was
it a dual triode's heaters?) went off in EveAnna's head and she
summoned Balta into the QC room. "Babba," she fondly called him, "I
want you to take this thing and lay out a PCB for it. I know you can
do it. Here's how..." Baltazar's eyes lit up. He grabbed it and took
it home armed with film, black crepe tape and donuts. Monday morning
Baltazar brought in his first PCB layout complete-- double-sided! He
turned it in to Elias, our printed circuit board craftsman, to whip
up a copper. Within a few hours Balta had stuffed the copper board
and built the new prototype. The test boys fired it up and it worked
first time. After a few revisions to optimize ground paths and to
implement minor circuit changes, the 300B preamplifier went into
production. Beautiful.
Baltazar has moved back into the R&D team at
Manley. His talents were too great to ignore. Drawing upon his over
ten years experience with this equipment, he is a natural at printed
circuit board layout and physical design with great attention to
neatness and accuracy. With a little introduction from Hutch, Balta
picked up the CAD (Computer Aided Design) layout program with
incredible ease drafting up professional panel layouts for our metal
shop. (This is a big improvement over days of old when David used to
turn in metal plates with Sharpie-pen markings!)
Baltazar has since done ground-up layouts for the MIC/EQ
500, the SE/PP 807
Amplifier, The new STINGRAY,
and the VOXBOX. (And
many more, actually...) If you look inside any of these units, you are sure to be
impressed. Balta is directly responsible for the chassis designs and cosmetic
flair of many of our products, such as the MAHI
and SNAPPER. He's a great team player and follows direction and
instruction from Hutch and EveAnna with a gentle attitude while also
contributing a wealth of clever ideas that only he could think of.
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These days, Baltazar's primary duty is renovating and
revisiting older products to make them more buildable for future
production runs. Baltazar works closely with Mitch to lay out new Manley
hifi products. Balta also chases our prototype metal parts around Chino
for finishing, working closely with the sheet metal shop, powder coating, anodizing,
as well as our own machine shop to develop the prototypes.
And it is Baltazar who continues to hand-build
each and every Manley Microphone (in his spare time!)
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Actually in his spare time he loves to hang out with Paulina Rubio. See
him here on this video!
Manley Labs would like to publicly acknowledge
the great contribution and talent Baltazar Hernandez brings to the
Manley team. We are very proud of him.
Baltazar at 20 years old in the early part of 1989.
