Ron Murphy

March 3, 1948 - January 12, 2008
Record cutter, mastering engineer, and record producer at Sound Enterprises (formerly National Sound Corporation/see NSC Records page) in Detroit. Ron Murphy engineered for the first time around May 1966 for title "We Go To Pieces" a 45 single on Forest Hairston's Viney records label. He manned the classic reverb and echo units during Isaac Hayes' recording of “Walk On By” in 1971 at United Sound. In 1989 Steve Martel and Ron Murphy decided to open a store specializing in old phonograph records, situated at 17610 W. Warren in Detroit, Michigan. They named the business National Sound Corporation. Murphy came to the attention of the techno pioneers in the 1980s when the likes of Derrick May and Juan Atkins stumbled upon that westside cutting plant. Murphy owned a vintage cutting lathe from the 1930s and agreed to master and cut the metal prototype records. He pioneered pressing lock-grooves on records and invented NSC-X2 Groove Technology, he also encouraged artists and producers to make their end product unique, by including etchings written onto the records or enabling records to play outwards. He was also helpful in fixing young artist recordings that came out-of-phase, poorly-segued, or badly recorded but for all sort of release produced a warm, full and genuine sound. Ron Murphy was also known as "Motown Murphy", as he had one of the largest Motown records collection and an extensive knowledge of the Detroit musical history. Ron Murphy spanned two great moments of Detroit music history: Motown and Detroit Techno. He cut masters for many of Techno's innovators using his Scully lathe (which now resides in Mike Banks' Submerge building in Detroit).