John Wheeler (audio/video technologist)
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John Henry Wheeler (born 1957 in Bristol, Tennessee) is an Emmy-Award-winning audio/video engineer, computer programmer, and developer of the Penteo surround-sound process. He is currently also a satellite communications field engineer for NBC News in San Francisco.
A teenager in the 1970s, John worked as an apprentice recording engineer under Rick Salyer and Bobby All at Tri-State Recording in Kingsport, Tennessee, a studio which was producing several nationally distributed southern gospel albums per week, using an MCI console and 24-track recorder. In addition, the studio operated its own phonograph record manufacturing plant, where John helped to maintain the record presses, boilers, and associated manufacturing equipment.
Later in the '70s, John became a producer at Dallas-based TM Productions, where he co-produced radio station jingles and needle drop production libraries. He often traveled to Hollywood to work with the Ron Hicklin Singers on TM jingles.
In the 1980s, he was hired as an audio engineer and music editor for Turner Production (TBS/CNN) in Atlanta, for the development of stereo television, and pioneered many techniques for live multi-location television remotes for "The Jason Project" and the original 1986 "Goodwill Games" from Moscow. As a music editor, John needle drop scored several episodes of "World of Audubon" and Jacques Cousteau specials, and was responsible for recording and editing much of the music which appeared on TBS and CNN from its startup until 1990.
In 1988, while at TBS, he won an audio engineering Emmy award for the American version of "Letters from a Dead Man", a motion picture which Ted Turner purchased from Soviet Television for air in the U.S. on Turner Broadcasting. [1]
As a hobby, John was a C language programmer in MS-DOS and Unix, and became a database normalization design hobbyist. After Ted Turner's purchase of MGM in 1987, John developed a networked film library database system for Turner/MGM between operations in Culver City and Atlanta, using the tools of Informix Software on an SCO Xenix platform. In 1990, he was recruited to the San Francisco Bay Area as a technical services consultant for Informix.[2] Working for Informix, he spent three years developing one of the country's first real-time stock options trading systems at Group One in San Francisco, in 1991 linking their floor traders on dumb terminals in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia with the home offices in San Francisco.
In the 1990s, he was hired by Skywalker Sound president Tom Kobayashi to be the Core Network Architect for Entertainment Digital Network (EDnet) based at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California and worked as the personal installer of a private real-time digital audio network linking Skywalker with Capitol Records studios, Sony Music studios, 20th Century Fox studios, A&M Records, and the home studios of Mariah Carey/Tommy Mottola, Robert Zemeckis, Phil Ramone, Walter Afanasieff, and Gloria Estefan for digital audio internetworking. He also co-engineered the telecommunications links for Phil Ramone for the Frank Sinatra "Duets" series. [3] He has the distinction of being the very last person credited on the last Frank Sinatra album ever produced, "Duets II".
[edit] Personal life
John is the great-grandson of "Singing Bob Leonard", who, along with his cousin Flanders Bays were the traveling music teachers in churches and schools in Benhams and Maces Spring, Virginia, whose turn-of-the-century students included the Carter Family, pioneer contributors to the beginnings of country music.
His mother, Margie, committed suicide in 1962, his step-dad also committed suicide in 1963, and John was raised by "Singing Bob"'s son Thomas Leonard, a building contractor, who first taught him many aspects of music theory as a child using the shape note system, which had been used by his own father to teach students in the 1800s. Thomas also built him a home recording studio where, as a teenager, John learned his later craft.
Openly gay, he participates and promotes the annual "Out@NBCU" NBC Universal gay contingency in the West Hollywood gay pride parade.
He currently resides in Berkeley, California.
[edit] References
- ^ NATAS 1988 Atlanta Emmy Awards
- ^ CIO Magaine, March 1999 "Developing Database Strategies using 4GLs"
- ^ Album credit on CD liner.
