10 Years of 20K! How It All Began

Dallas Taylor opens by saying 20,000 Hertz has exactly 892 premium subscribers and needs 108 more to reach 1,000. He says the show cannot exist without money, and that premium-feed revenue provides crucial predictability amid months when the show makes little or nothing. Subscribers receive the entire catalog and future episodes ad-free, while still hearing the mystery sound and important announcements, and new episodes arrive three days early. He then introduces this unusual, partly unscripted oral history of the show’s first decade, including its struggles, triumphs, future, and an unaired pilot he finds painfully cringe-inducing.

Dallas traces his beginning to a financially struggling childhood in Arkansas’s Delta, where his band director drove him to university trumpet lessons after school. Trumpet gave the quiet child friendships, attention, first-chair all-region honors for roughly five or six years, three Allstate selections, and a verbal full-scholarship commitment to the University of North Texas. That scholarship was revoked when the teacher gave it to a master’s student, so Dallas attended the University of Central Arkansas, where he met his wife and close friends. He toured nationally with the Cavaliers drum corps, playing mellophone, but returning to trumpet damaged his confidence and led to panic attacks.

After botching a major trumpet solo during a panic attack, Dallas’s friend Neil introduced him to Radiohead’s Kid A. Dallas calls the first five notes of “Everything in Its Right Place” the biggest sonic expansion of his life because electronic production and curated sound revealed that music was larger than notes. He began using Finale and Fruity Loops to write and produce without a band or orchestra. At the Dallas Sound Lab, physics lessons about frequencies, hertz, bit rates, sample rates, and acoustics connected directly to trumpet technique. He rejected music recording because it required acting like a different person, but recreating a movie’s entire soundscape convinced him that post-production audio—“orchestras with sounds”—was his field.

While working the front desk at an Arlington Wyndham near the Texas Rangers’ ballpark, Dallas met an ESPN field-sound mixer who let him hold a parabolic dish during a game. Positioned at first base, Dallas pointed the microphone toward his childhood baseball hero Rafael Palmeiro and worked within arm’s reach of players at the dugout water jug. The successful credit helped him get an internship at Dallas NBC affiliate Channel 5. Audio mixer Benny Benavidez took him under his wing and taught preparation for live television, including checklists, fresh batteries, and backup microphones. Dallas says the audio community remains unusually generous despite competing for corporate jobs.

When NBC acquired Telemundo in late 2001, Dallas accepted an audio job despite speaking no Spanish, reasoning that he could say yes and learn later. Not knowing the language let him concentrate on the technical mix, and he later transferred from Dallas to Telemundo Los Angeles, working near Days of Our Lives, NBC4, The Tonight Show, and a mural documenting the NBC chimes. He also mixed Fox’s Good Day Live. A friend, Vanessa, overstated his post-production experience to G4, giving him a brutal first post-audio job that required producing promos in an hour and full shows in three or four hours. He practiced Pro Tools at home until he could keep up.

Dallas wanted high-end scripted television and interviewed at Los Angeles post house Wildwoods, while simultaneously receiving a senior sound-designer offer from Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, Maryland. Wildwoods owner Derek advised him to take Discovery, arguing that Los Angeles would remain available and that respected East Coast experience would increase his value there. Dallas followed the advice and enjoyed a social, technically rich facility with more than 60 edit rooms, hundreds of support staff, and other sound designers. He remixed major Discovery programs for the UK, worked on Mythbusters and When We Left Earth, and found the educational “edutainment” mission meaningful.

After Discovery became publicly traded in 2008, Dallas watched TLC shift toward cheap attention-grabbing programming such as My 10,000 Pound Life and Honey Boo Boo, while educational divisions and colleagues were cut. He concluded the company now served stockholders more than viewers or education and left. In 2009, he quit his stable senior role, worked from his basement under the name DeFacto Sound, and built a client base including National Geographic. He eventually mixed about 200 episodes of How It’s Made, plus programs for History and Smithsonian. As work expanded, he rented a Silver Spring studio, hired freelancers, and credits his wife—his first project manager and “the spine” of the company—with sustaining it.

By 2016, DeFacto was mixing major game trailers, including The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and a documentary that won Sundance, but one dominant client had become dangerously important. Dallas moved his company into that client’s space out of fear of losing the work; after the owner sold the business to employees, the new preferences redirected jobs to Dallas’s former staff. With a new baby, another child on the way, five or six employees, worsening health, and severe anxiety, he searched for productive use of paid downtime. Remembering that great companies capitalize on waste, he proposed a sound-focused podcast to keep the team creatively engaged. His wife and staff thought getting more conventional jobs would be wiser.

Inspired by Radiolab’s sound-rich storytelling and 99% Invisible’s romantic treatment of design, Dallas entered Radiotopia founder Roman Mars’s PodQuest with a two-minute Siri proof of concept. The awkward pilot interviewed Siri’s original voice, Susan Bennett, and a text-to-speech researcher, but Dallas says his narration clearly lacked confidence. The show did not reach PodQuest’s final round; Ear Hustle won. Dallas nevertheless had the team develop episodes about Siri and the NBC chimes. Making only two roughly ten-minute episodes took a year and cost about $50,000 of his personal money so staff and writers could be paid. At Third Coast, Roman unexpectedly praised the show and asked to run the NBC-chimes episode on 99% Invisible, telling Dallas that a meaningful body of work mattered more than nitpicking individual episodes.

Dallas published 20,000 Hertz on November 1, 2016; the first episodes drew only a few hundred listeners, but Roman’s 99% Invisible cross-promotion seeded the audience. Downloads rose from about 300 to 3,000, then 50,000 and more than 100,000, while admired edutainment producers and advertisers began approaching DeFacto Sound. Advertising allowed Dallas to repay the podcast’s startup debt, regain his sanity, and feel that the show was making a difference. The anniversary episode ends before resolving what happened next: Dallas says that at the beginning of 2025 he was deeply depressed and realized he might have to end 20,000 Hertz, promising that story in the next installment.