Thanks for your interest in BFSSoft!

BFSSoft is a small company dedicated to providing high quality, professional audio products and services for Audio Professionals, Musicians, Theatres, Clubs, Churches and DJ’s at small to medium sized venues.

It all started with my father.

He was fascinated with electronics in his youth and basically taught himself amplifier and radio theory. Later, he began building his own vacuum tube amplifiers and radios from scratch. He then joined the Army and was an advanced level radar technician, furthering his knowledge. One of his favorite designs was a 300 watt RMS per channel class AB’ (AB prime) push pull set up in his basement shop. Back then, high power speakers were not readily available, so he designed and built his own enclosures employing multiple drivers to handle the power. Enclosure design was in its infancy and involved a lot of trial and error (and wood) for volume and ports. I came along several years later and was extremely lucky and privileged to hear high quality sound growing up. He loved music, and when he ‘cranked it’ I remember Mom yelling from upstairs that the dishes were rattling and falling over in the hutch. I was hooked, and the great sound prompted me to start my musical endeavors. Ironically though, I became a drummer. No electronics required which totally perplexed him for years. I was always down in his shop, asking questions and such so he decided to ‘learn’ me something about electronics. He taught me well and by age 12, had built my first vacuum tube amp. I remember him pointing out my errors just by looking at the circuit. I swear the man had the RCA Vacuum Tube Manual memorized front to back. On a positive note for both of us, my bands were powered by our homebrew amps and speakers for years. Later in life, vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, resulting in parts becoming very scarce for building or repairing those vt amps. Transistors, especially power transistors, lacked any large signal technical specs and were known to vary their characteristics wildly, even between matched pairs. Mosfets hadn’t been invented yet. Amp development became a nightmare as the trial and error method just killed transistors right and left. The frustration caused me to leave the ‘make it yourself’ mentality and I started to work with commercially available amps. Altec Lansing, and JBL started manufacturing decent drivers and their speaker systems would now perform well at decent power levels. I still like to build my own from time to time though.

We always offered repair services to local musicians, theaters,and schools and when inexperienced sound men and musicians started to fry their speakers with some regularity, we started re-coning them. Those trying to imitate ‘The Who’ and like bands also tended to toast some of their amps. I always had two or three Fender, Marshall, or Sunn amps in queue to be repaired. It was nice pocket change in my high school and college years.

We also offered commercial sound installation on a somewhat limited basis for small and medium sized venues. These were usually clubs, bars and churches. Interesting combination? Overhead paging was also offered although not my favorite endeavor.

After college, I started a career in the telephone industry as the local repair, and installation business had become stagnant, due to the local economy crash from steel mill and mine closings. Dad really kept the business going, as I was on the road a lot. Telephone switches are computers at their core, and being field tech support, I became heavily involved with their hardware and software programming. Digital sound made its debut, along with MS Windows, but there was really no good digital sound editing and processing software available at a reasonable price. I decided to write my own called WavEditor. After a year’s development, the program was completed. It worked fairly well so I decided to market the software and was successful in selling quite a few copies. Hence, the start of BFSSoft. I managed to upgrade the program to the latest operating systems as they released, also adding enhancements and new features from time to time. The program is still offered under the software section of this site, but its popularity has dropped due to the releases of open source editors such as Audacity.

As life goes, my father passed and I pulled that business in under the BFSSoft logo. Today, I am retired from the telephone industry and the business survives with me and my sons, to whom I have passed my knowledge so that they may continue serving the sound community when I’m gone.

Please check out the individual sections of our webpage to see some of the products and services we offer.

BFS