Thomas Stockham
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Thomas Greenway Stockham (December 22, 1933-January 6, 2004) was an American scientist who developed the first practical digital audio recording system, and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing as well.
Stockham, known as the "father of digital audio", earned an Sc.D. degree from MIT in 1959 and was appointed Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. While at MIT, he noticed several of the students using a MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-0 mainframe computer installed at the campus to record their voices digitally into the computer's memory, using a microphone and a loudspeaker connected to a A/D-D/A converter attached to the TX-0. This led Stockham to his own digital audio experiments on this same computer in 1962.
In 1968 he left MIT for the University of Utah, and in 1975 founded Soundstream, Inc. The company developed a 16-bit digital audio recording system using a 16-track Honeywell instrumentation tape recorder as a transport, connected to digital audio recording and playback hardware of Stockham's design. It ran at a sampling rate of 50 kHz, as opposed to the audio CD sampling rate of 44.1 kHz.
Soundstream Inc. was the first commercial digital recording company in the United States, located in Salt Lake City. Stockham was the first to make a commercial digital recording, using his own Soundstream recorder in 1976 at the Santa Fe Opera. In 1980, Soundstream merged with the Digital Recording Company (DRC) and became DRC/Soundstream.
Dr Stockham played a key role in the digital restoration of Enrico Caruso recordings, described in a 1975 IEEE paper "Blind Deconvolution through Digital Signal Processing." These recordings were the first ever to be digitally restored by computer, and were released on the album "Caruso-A Legendary Performer" by RCA Records in 1976.
In 1974 he investigated President Richard Nixon's White House tapes.
Dr. Stockham's developments and contributions to digital audio paved the way for later digital audio technologies, such as the audio compact disc and DAT (Digital Audio Tape).
Dr Stockham received wide recognition for his pioneering contributions to digital audio. He received, among many others, the Gold Medal award from the Audio Engineering Society, a Technical Emmy award in 1988, a Grammy award from NARAS in 1994, and a Scientific and Engineering award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999.
