Thomas G. Stockham Jr, the internationally recognised "father of digital recording" whose pioneering work in the 1960s and '70s revolutionised the recording industry and laid the groundwork for music on compact discs and other forms of digital audio, has died. He was 70.
Thomas Stockham, who also served on a panel of audio experts who analysed President Nixon's secret White House tapes, died on Tuesday from complications related to Alzheimer's disease in a hospice in Salt Lake City.
For his role in the development of digital recording and editing, he received Emmy, Grammy and Oscar awards.
He was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah in 1975 when he founded Soundstream Inc., the world's first digital recording company.
Thomas Stockham and his company first captured public attention in 1976.
That year, RCA released Caruso: A Legendary Performer, the first in a series of the famed opera singer's early 20th-century recordings that had been digitally remastered by Soundstream.
He and his colleagues had digitally eliminated surface noise and compensated for flaws such as the tinny sounds and echoes caused by the primitive recording horns used at the time.
The results were stunningly clear and clean restored recordings of the great Italian tenor.
The same year, Stockham made the first live digital recording, of the Santa Fe Opera, and demonstrated his recorder at the annual Audio Engineering Society meeting.
The demonstration caused a stir at the gathering but produced its share of sceptics.
Thomas Stockham later recalled that several prominent members of the society told him, "You can make a limited demonstration easily enough, but when you get it in the field, it will fail." Stockham had spent more than a decade developing the equipment and methods for translating analogue sound into a digital format and had encountered his share of disbelievers.
Once the concept of digital audio became a reality, it generated an active and vocal opposition. Many thought sound quality would suffer, giving rise to a group called Musicians Against Digital.
There were even those who believed that digital audio could be harmful to the listener's health.
"It was silly in those early days," recalled Thomas Stockham's son, Tom.
"Frankly, people didn't believe it could be done, and he did it." Basically, what he did was take sound waves produced by either a microphone or a pre-existing recording and digitise the sound waves into numbers with a computer. The numbers are then stored in the computer and, when brought back up, they're reconverted into sound waves that can be heard.
"It was a real big breakthrough," said Larry DeVries, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah and a friend of Stockham.
Traditional vinyl records, Larry DeVries said, are subject to wear, scratching and distortion with time and temperature, "but once you convert the signal to numbers on a computer, they're permanent." And by digitising sound, DeVries said, "it opened it to the power of the computer for refinement and manipulation that was every bit as important as the permanence part." Stockham also was the principal contributing engineer to a digital hearing aid.
In the years leading up to his 1994 Alzheimer's diagnosis, he worked extensively in digital image processing that helped with the human genome project.
Those who knew him recall a modest, gentlemanly man who loved teaching and solving problems."He was consumed with trying to make the very best stuff, and when somebody said it could not be done, he'd get a glint in his eye and get it done," Stockham's son recalled.
Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Stockham earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1959. He began laying the groundwork for Soundstream after moving to the University of Utah, where he helped create its Computer Science Department.
During 1973-74, he was the primary investigator on the six-member panel that analysed the White House's Watergate tapes .
Thomas Stockham and the other panellists concluded that someone deliberately erased the 18½ minute gap on one tape. The finding provided evidence of a cover-up and led to Nixon's resignation. In 1998, he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of digital audio recording.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Martha; three other children, sons John and David and daughter Carol Forester; and eight grandchildren.
Thomas G. Stockham Jr. Born 1934; died January 6th, 2004