For most aficionados of The Beatles, the hefty 960 pages of music historian Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles: All These Years: Volume One – Tune In, which takes the band’s story up to the Summer of 1962, would be more than enough to scratch that super-fan itch. But such is Erik Vaveris’ passion for the band, he just had to get his hands on the Extended Special Edition – all 1,728 pages of it! By the end of this tome, such is the detail on The Beatles formative years, they are yet to have even recorded their first single – let alone conquered the US and revolutionised popular music.
But Vaveris finds these early years even more fascinating than the global fame to come. “I love music documentaries, but it’s the lead-in to when they become successful that I find most interesting,” he says. “There’s a lot about Liverpool leading up to World War Two, and after, and whole sections about people’s lives in the North and the South of England.”
It’s tempting to tie this passion for origins to the approach Vaveris takes in his role at Shure. As vice president of product management and chief marketing officer, Vaveris spends his working life examining how ideas evolve into products and deciding why some innovations are more likely to succeed than others. There’s a parallel with his deep curiosity about The Beatles. In Lewisohn’s book, he is learning in minute detail about the unique circumstances that created a cultural phenomenon.
MUSICAL ROOTS
Vaveris was born in Western Pennsylvania before moving with his family to the Chicago area at the age of eight – a region he has called home ever since. Like many people who go into pro AV, Vaveris unites a deep love of music with a passion for technology. Alongside singing in a Chicago choir, he plays bass and some guitar in two contrasting groups. “One is led by a singer-songwriter, and it’s somewhere between alt-country, Americana and rock. And my new group is more on the indie-pop side. Even though I’m the oldest person in the band by a wide margin, we’re writing songs drawing on late-70s and 80s influences. It takes time, but it’s a lot of fun and very rewarding.”
His own playing has been shaped by listening to past greats, including Paul McCartney’s basslines in The Beatles. Vaveris says: “His lines are just amazing – so melodic. On The Beatles’ song Something you can just listen to the bass part on its own.”
Alongside his aesthetic appreciation, Vaveris has always had a technical interest in how music works. After graduating from Dartmouth College with a BA in Music, he completed a Master of Music in Music Technology at Northwestern University in Illinois. “I took hearing science courses, and courses about cognition and computer science, and learned how to code, and about DSP algorithms,” he recalls. “That started me on a trajectory that led to working at Shure.”
During his studies, and for a period afterwards, Vaveris pursued several business ventures, although it was a precarious way to earn a living. He worked part-time in a recording studio, built websites for musicians and local businesses, and tried to get a startup off the ground with friends. “We were working on how to enhance the playback of audio over the internet, and other things to help the production side, including plugins. It was an exciting time,” he says.
CAREER SHIFT
But the lack of stability became more of an issue once he got married to his wife Jane in 2000. Fortunately, Vaveris lived only a 10-minute drive from the headquarters of one of the US’s leading audio companies, Shure, in Evanston, near Chicago. As luck would have it, an opportunity arose in the product management department. In 2001, at the age of 28, he stepped into the world of pro AV.
“It came at the right time. Not just because I was married, but also because I felt fragmented and needed focus.” he remembers. “What was lucky about getting the job was that Shure was 76 years old at the time with established ways of doing things and a lot of know-how built into processes, which I had never experienced before. I remember thinking ‘it’s so great you have this process that you actually know how to do this’. I would have had to figure this all out for the first time on my own.”
His early years at Shure were spent working on signal processing products for installed sound – legacy names like the DFR11 EQ and P4800 that longtime Shure customers will know. While establishing himself, Vaveris also completed an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, broadening his expertise in strategy, marketing and finance. A stint in market research followed before, in 2005, he moved into a product management role focused on wireless microphones – a category he would lead for close to a decade. It was, he says, “an incredibly creative time”, coinciding with the shift from analogue to digital wireless. “An explosion of insight led ultimately to our product portfolio today.”
In 2014, he moved into strategic planning – his first sustained exposure to executive-level planning – before a significant restructuring at Shure in 2016. Under new CEO Chris Schyvinck, Shure centralised its global marketing operations. Vaveris took the lead and moved to Germany to do it.
GERMAN LESSONS
Vaveris spent from 2016 to mid-2018 based in Eppingen, a small town near Shure’s European operations, tasked with rebuilding marketing operations without losing regional focus. “It was such a big shift. And it was important to show everybody that we weren’t going to make every decision with only a US focus.”
For Vaveris, being immersed in a foreign culture was an incredible learning experience, even if he failed completely to master the language. “I learned so much from colleagues there, but I was speaking English every day and I tried at first to learn German, but gave up pretty fast, I must confess.”
The rigorous German approach to planning, however, left a lasting impression. He contrasts it with the US, where a clear objective is set at the start and further decisions are taken as the project develops. “In Germany, they like to have more of a multi-step view of how they’re going to get there, with more thorough planning for contingencies. It takes more time, but you have a better roadmap. Germans are famous for making great cars and you have to plan thoroughly, and understand all the contingencies right through the supply chain and manufacturing.”
Since 2022, Vaveris has combined leadership of global marketing with head of product management, working alongside chief strategy officer Scott Sullivan – a former boss and long-time colleague from his wireless microphone category days. The split reflects a deliberate effort to separate longer-horizon technology investment from Sullivan’s strategy remit, while keeping both marketing and product management aligned around customer insight. “To me, the strategic core of both is exactly the same,” he says. “It’s understanding the needs of customers and how to make their lives better, their jobs better, help them get results more easily. The delivery is different – here’s the next product, or here’s how we’re going to message it – but the core insight is the same.”
He sees his value not as a technologist in the purest sense, but as a translator between technical and commercial worlds. “I wouldn’t be the person to come up with a great signal processing algorithm,” he explains, “but I could talk to the people doing it and help bridge the gap between what customers were saying and what we deliver.”
BEYOND AUDIO
In recent years, Vaveris has played a central role in Shure’s transformation from an audio specialist into a full AV solutions provider. “This is a new market – we’ve served corporate, government and education for a long time, but if we’re producing the compute device running Teams or Zoom, that’s a different sales cycle. We need to reach different decision-makers and work with integration partners differently.”
Becoming a full AV solutions provider has also required Shure to take a more collaborative approach with its industry partners. The company continues to expand its partnership programme, which includes product testing and integration, while ShureCloud is playing an increasingly important role. Shure recently announced a series of cloud-to-cloud integrations built using the ShureCloud API. One of the key partners is AVI-SPL, whose Symphony platform has long been able to communicate with Shure devices and will now support direct cloud-to-cloud integration alongside a growing number of other partner platforms. “The result is a more connected experience for customers,” Vaveris says. “They can already receive alerts if something’s not working, update firmware and carry out system health checks. Looking ahead, the intelligence we’re going to be able to build on that foundation is really pretty incredible.”
Having found fulfilment in his career in pro AV, Vaveris is happy to pass on advice to anyone considering moving into the industry. The key characteristic you need, he believes, is a compulsive curiosity about how technology could be improved. “Are you the kind of person who, even with a toaster oven or a TV remote, thinks about how it could have been made better, or wonders why it works the way it does?” he asks. “If you have that mindset, whether you’re working for a manufacturer, a system designer or an integrator, you can be great at AV.”
Just as important, he argues, is thinking about technology from other people’s perspectives. He offers a domestic example – he has configured his his home AV setup not just around his own priorities, but around how his wife and daughter want it to work. And it isn’t because they’re any less capable. His wife, Jane, is a former TV producer now learning the harp and writing a novel, and his daughter Gwen is about to start a nursing degree at Loyola University Chicago. “They’re not Luddites who require it to be super simple. No, they’re nerds too, and can figure things out. But to be in AV, you have to be able to reconsider your mindset and make adjustments,” he says.
CRITICAL EYE
The habit of constantly questioning audio equipment, he says, is not something that’s easy to switch off. A big sports fan, whenever Vaveris is at a basketball game, he finds himself distracted from the action by hunting for Shure DCA 901 microphones mounted on the stanchion behind the backboard and net. “I’m always trying to zoom in and see – are they using this one? What’s going on there?” he laughs.
The habit extends beyond his own company’s products. Watching baseball with his daughter as lifelong Chicago White Sox fans, he applies the same analytical mindset. Rather than following the play, his mind wanders to how a particular sound was captured, or the signal chain behind a broadcast he’s watching at home. “The nerd thing gets in the way,” he admits. “I’m always wondering – why did that sound like that? How are they making that work?”
Whether he is reading 1,728 pages about The Beatles’ formative years, dissecting the signal chain behind a live sports broadcast or questioning the design of a household appliance, Vaveris approaches the world with the same instinctive curiosity. For him, understanding how things work is every bit as important as appreciating the finished result.
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