Inventor, Head and Catalyst
Without any college education, he surprised the audio community in 1982 with the QUANTEC QRS, a digital reverberator, considered to be among the all time favorites in this field, and a legend for years. Prerequisite for device designs of such dimension is a lifelong dedication with music and electronics. It is likely that his childhood in the secluded northern Black Forest in Germany played quite a certain role in his development, because at places with hardly any neighborhood kids to play with, you have to find some other way to occupy yourself with.
Born in 1954, he was only at the tender age of 4, when - thanks to the reading skills he'd already acquired with the help of his patient father - he discovered the metal construction set by Märklin in a catalog. Bingo! At first his interest only went to the genuine screwdriver included in the set, but later on, to electric solenoids and motors, too. In any case, that toy was to become his favorite occupation for the next years. Having just turned 6, he enthusiastically rode his bike to his weekly piano lesson, and at age 10, he had already left his mark on all table clothes in his parents' house with his soldering iron. It's exactly that mix of art and technology, that inevitably led to the crucial experience - here's a soundbite from an interview:
»A few of you know that I got my pocket money as a young lad playing organ during Sunday services. My best memories come from playing evenings during the week when the church was empty. I experimented with muted flutes and nasal reeds, pressing the keys slowly to expand the onset of attacks, and went wild with tremolo. My point is that it was through listening, and listening alone, intently and repeatedly, that I learned what true reverberation sounded like.«
Unlike most of his colleagues, Mr. Buchleitner thinks that prototypes are simply waste of time. True to his motto »do it right the first time«, he regards building prototypes as »nothing but a poor account of non-concentrating developer amateurs.« His standard is to take ideas for new devices, and put 'em directly into action - i.e. to take an idea, then directly draw the documentation for mass production out of it, including the definition of several hundred components! Even though his concept works in no less than half of his designs, he's still not content: »After all, it's my job to make life hard for a bunch of 10 Japanese.«
