Jerry Harvey

Jerry Harvey (born 1961) is an American sound engineer best known for inventing, along with Karl Cartwright, a series of customized dual-speaker in-ear monitors in 1995.

Jerry Harvey was born in 1961 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.

While Harvey was tinkering on his 1978 red Pontiac Trans Am, Hagar's people approached him on the street and asked to borrow his car in exchange for free tickets.

They then used Harvey's car to drive on stage during Hagar's anthem "Trans Am (Highway Wonderland)."

The show's promoter gave Harvey a job as a gofer, which led to Harvey working as a roadie for the local band The Agents.

He soon became the light, and ultimately, the sound guy for the band, even though he was still underage at most of their venues.

Harvey soon began traveling the world mixing sound for performers such as Kiss, Morrissey and The Cult.

His first break in the music business occurred in 1980, when the Gland Slam Superjam rock tour starring April Wine, Judas Priest, and Sammy Hagar performed at the St. Louis Busch Stadium.

In 1986 Harvey met David Lee Roth at a bar, and soon began mixing sound for Roth, and then Van Halen, on tour.

According to Inc. magazine, "From his perch on the left side of the stage behind a black drop, Harvey's job, essentially, was to make sure the band members liked what they heard (as opposed to the person behind the big board out in the crowd, who only has to please the drunken audience)."

In 1995, Alex Van Halen told Harvey during the band's rehearsals for their Balance tour that the noise on stage was too much.

The massive volume from the stage monitors and speakers were damaging his ears and making it difficult for the band members to hear one another.

Harvey began tinkering and looking for components to solve the problem; in Japan he found tiny electrical components, and in the United States he found a tiny speaker designed for a pacemaker.

He created a tiny in-ear speaker system that connected to a small receiver on Alex's belt via thin cables.

The receiver then picked up the wireless signal from Harvey's mixing board.

The in-ear monitors had two small speakers to separate output volume into low and high frequencies for bass and treble, and they fit into shells that were impressions of Alex's ears.

The in-ear monitors also blocked out ambient noise, and according to Alex Van Halen, "It was like night and day."

Sebastian Bach and other members of Skid Row, who were opening for Van Halen on tour, soon wanted their own monitors, and paid $3000 cash for six pairs.

After his third client Engelbert Humperdinck requested one, Harvey decided to create the company Ultimate Ears, and word began spreading through the rock community.

His former wife Mindy left her job working as a sales manager for an office equipment supplier in St. Louis to handle the new business, as Harvey himself had no interest in leaving his job as a touring sound mixer.

That year the couple amicably separated, and they both separately moved to Las Vegas to run Ultimate Ears out of Mindy's house.

Harvey continued to tour, finishing up the Balance tour with Van Halen and then mixing for k.d. lang on the All You Can Eat tour and Mötley Crüe on their Generation Swine tour.

He marketed Ultimate Ears while doing so, though he often had to convince artists that they wouldn't look like hearing aids on stage.

A custom pair went for $700 to $900.

Ultimate Ears contracted Westone, a Colorado Springs manufacturer of custom-fit earpieces, to create the shell casings for the musicians' commissions.

Westone also began assembling the monitors.

Profits jumped in 1998 when Harvey introduced the fifth-generation model the UE-5.

By 2000, Ultimate Ears was becoming a fixture among rock artists, and Harvey's pieces were used by the Rolling Stones, Faith Hill, Enrique Iglesias, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Near the end of 2001 Ultimate Ears had added some 200 artists including Cirque du Soleil, the Late Show with David Letterman, and various megachurches.

In 2001, however, the relationship with Ultimate Ears and Westone began to fall apart.

While on tour Harvey heard from sources that Westone was claiming ownership to his custom designs, as well as trying to set up a separate European distribution.

An attorney informed Mindy that Westone owned all the trademarks and patents associated with Ultimate Ears, and that Harvey had no patent protection.

Harvey decided to retake control of the business.

However, while he had designed the interior circuitry of the monitors, he didn't know how to make the acrylic shells.

Westone also had all the rock star ear impressions.

Harvey decided to travel to Florida to research hearing aid manufacturing so they could create their own manufacturing lab.

While at a two-week hearing aid course in Orlando, he befriended instructor Chomphorn "Noy" Soudaly, a hearing aid technician from Laos.

He hired Noy at double his own salary to help create the lab he planned on setting up in Las Vegas.

He founded Ultimate Ears that same year, and in 2007, founded JH Audio.

He has served as the sound engineer for artists as varied as Van Halen, Kiss, Morrissey, the Cult, the Knack, David Lee Roth, Mötley Crüe, k.d. lang, and Linkin Park.