PROFILE
Dave Dysart
By Michael Raine
D
ave Dysart’s affable and clean-cut de-
meanor 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 audiophiles 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
strangest reasons,” he laughs.
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, Dysart established a good
relationship with the team at HHB Communications in the U.K.
By the mid- to late-‘90s, HHB had expanded 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 Yor-
kville Sound – has become one of the most trusted names in
Canadian pro audio distribution among recording 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 con-
nected to work. Again, he is a rock and roll lifer, and these days,
that means gigging and recording with UIC, which was a forma-
tive 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 Professional Sound
18 PROFESSIONAL SOUND