John Wheeler (audio/video technologist)
John Henry Wheeler (born 1957 in Bristol, Tennessee) is an audio/video engineer, computer programmer, and developer of the Penteo surround-sound process.
A teenager in the 1970s, John worked as a recording engineer on Country and Gospel records in his home state of Tennessee. In addition, the studio operated its own phonograph record manufacturing plant, where John helped to maintain the record presses, boilers, and associated manufacturing equipment.
John became a producer at Dallas-based TM Productions, where he co-produced radio station commercial jingles, sales presentations, and needle drop production libraries.
In 1985, he was hired as an audio engineer and music editor for Turner Production (TBS/CNN) in Atlanta, for the development of their stereo television efforts, and developed many techniques for live multi-location television remotes for "The Jason Project"[1] 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 editing most of the original theme music which appeared on CNN from 1985 until 1990.
In 1988, while at TBS, he won an audio engineering Emmy award for a promotion 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. [2]
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.[3] Working for Informix, he spent three years developing one of the country's first real-time stock options trading systems at Group One[4] in San Francisco, in 1991 linking their floor traders in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and San Francisco using AppleTalk tunnelling through internet protocol via uunet to tie together local networks. At the time, the Internet was built primarily on the NSFNET; John asked for and received special permission to use the Internet for research use.
In the 1990s, he was hired by Skywalker Sound president Tom Kobayashi in the role of Core Network Architect for Entertainment Digital Network (EDnet), first 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. [5]
After departing EDnet, John spent two years as a field sound technician on the TV show COPS, traveling across the US to shadow police officers for the show with a shotgun microphone.[6] In 2000, John joined NBC Universal as a satellite communications engineer, covering news events in Northern California.
In 2008, John started Penteo, LLC to develop and market the Penteo process. In 2010, Wheeler parted ways with the newly formed PenteoSurround, Inc., after he left company when control of the company was taken over by a group led by Tony Chapman.
In 2011, he joined ON24 as a Signal Acquisition Engineer for audio/video Internet streaming. In 2014, he became the Western Region Sales Engineer for Dejero Labs.
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 from the Bristol Sessions recorded in John's hometown.
His parents died when he was a child; 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.
References
- ↑ "Jason Learning | Education Through Exploration". Jasonproject.org. Retrieved 2014-06-08.
- ↑ NATAS 1988 Atlanta Emmy Awards
- ↑ CIO Magazine, January 1990
- ↑ "Group One Trading LP". Group1.com. Retrieved 2014-06-08.
- ↑ Album credit on CD liner.
- ↑ On screen credits.