Canadian Music Trade - December / January 2020 | Page 18

Faces
DAVE
DYSART
By Michael Raine
D
ave Dysart’s affable and
clean-cut demeanor belies
the fact that he’s a rock and
roll lifer, and for 35 years,
rock and roll has taken him
on a detour through the pro audio industry.
As president of the newly-rebranded
YSL Pro (formerly HHB Communications
Canada), Dysart has been a gear go-to for
countless high-profile recording studios,
engineers, and producers, as well as some of
Canada’s biggest broadcasters. And like so
many in pro audio, his journey began with a
love of music.
Growing up in Toronto, which he still
calls home, Dysart says: “There was always
music playing. My mother played piano and
my father and grandfather were into little
two-and-a-half-inch open-reel tape recorders
where you get a microphone and, lo and
behold, you can record your voice, which
was pretty darn cool,” he recalls. “Ironically
enough, we went to Expo 67 when I was
nine and walked into the Swiss booth and
there was a Revox tape recorder and I was on
that thing like white on rice. So yes, I think
it was destined to happen, really.”
Dysart later attended Toronto’s York
University to study English “and a bit of
music technology,” as he puts it, though
didn’t finish; instead, he found a job selling
hi-fi audio gear at the now-defunct Brack
Electronics, which served Toronto’s audio-
philes for decades.
“That’s an interesting job, to say the
least. In the professional world, people buy
technology because they need it to do a job;
when you get into the hi-fi world, especially
the tweak-y, kind of rarified high-end world,
people make buying decisions for the strang-
est reasons,” he laughs.
18 CANADIAN MUSIC TRADE
Nonetheless, Dysart’s skills caught the
eye of someone at Studer, which owned
Revox at the time. “Somebody went, ‘Who’s
the guy at Brack Electronics that’s selling
all this high-end Revox gear?’ And that was
me, so I started [at Studer Canada] in ’84 as
what they call sales coordinator, so I hand-
wrote an awful lot of orders. It was funny;
the first day I was at Studer, I walked into
the showroom on my lunch break and there
was this A800, a $100,000 24-track tape
recorder, and a big broadcast console and I
thought, ‘Oh, this is cool; I’ve arrived.’ So, it
all just went from there.”
During his time at Studer Canada, Dys-
art established a good relationship with the
team at HHB Communications in the U.K.
By the mid- to late-‘90s, HHB had expand-
ed from distribution into manufacturing
and was also looking to get into the North
American market, so in 1997, a few years
after Harman bought Studer, Dysart left to
lead HHB’s new Canadian subsidiary.
“There was a real affinity with the people
at HHB from the word ‘go’ and you want to
work with people you like,” he says. Over the
next two decades, HHB Communications
Canada – now YSL Pro for a tighter synergy
with parent company Yorkville Sound – has
become one of the most trusted names in
Canadian pro audio distribution among re-
cording studio and broadcast professionals. Its
line card includes heavyweights like Universal
Audio, Manley Laboratories, ADAM Audio,
Rupert Neve Designs, and more.
“I’ve always been lucky to represent
really high-grade gear. There is nothing in
our current portfolio that I am not proud of
selling, and never will be, so that makes it
pretty easy,” he says, but adds that when it
comes to his success in sales and the industry
in general, it’s simple: “Just treat people
properly.”
When Dysart is away from work, well,
he’s still pretty connected to work. Again,
he is a rock and roll lifer, and these days,
that means gigging and recording with
UIC, which was a formative group in the
CanRock movement of the late ‘80s and
early ’90s. When the band reformed about
three years ago, its original guitarist couldn’t
be part of it, so they called on their old
friend to join them. Warner Music Canada
has remastered and rereleased two of the old
records, Our Garage and Live Like Ninety,
and Dysart says they’re almost finished a
brand new one.
“We’re recording at Canterbury [Music
Company] with Jeremy Darby, who is an
absolutely wonderful engineer, and we got
to track to tape on a Studer, which I thought
was fun. I sold that machine back in the
early days, so it was like being reunited with
one of my kids,” he says.
Like so many in pro audio, Dysart says
it’s the creative people around him and their
mutual passion for technology that have
kept him in this industry for 35 years. “We’ll
get a new piece of gear in and I’ll take it into
the studio, plug it in, and try it out. I’ve
been doing that forever and will continue
to, but an awful lot of it is the personalities
that I get to work with. It’s an industry that
works for good reasons. You know, if I had
been in the weapons industry, I don’t think I
would have been here for 35 years, but being
in the audio business, and by extension the
music business, it’s been a lot of fun and
continues to be.”
Michael Raine is the Senior Editor of
Canadian Music Trade.