Thomas Stockham

Thomas Stockham
Born	December 22, 1933
Died	January 6, 2004(2004-01-06) (aged 70)
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Electrical engineering
Institutions	Soundstream University of Utah
Alma mater	MIT
Notable awards	Grammy

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 attended Montclair Kimberley Academy, graduating in the class of 1951 .^[1] Known as the "father of digital audio", he earned an Sc. D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and was appointed Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. While at MIT, he noticed several of the students using an 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 an 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.

Stockham played a key role in the digital restoration of Enrico Caruso recordings, described in a 1975 IEEE paper^[2]. 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.

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).

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, the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal in 1998^[3] and a Scientific and Engineering award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999.^[4]

References

1. ^ Alumni Awards, Montclair Kimberley Academy. Accessed March 6, 2011.
2. ^ Stockham, T.G., Jr., T.M. Cannon, and R.B. Ingebretsen, Blind deconvolution through Digital Signal Processing, Proceedings of the IEEE, April 1975.
3. ^ "IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal Recipients". IEEE. http://www.ieee.org/documents/kilby_rl.pdf. Retrieved February 27, 2011 (2011-02-27). 
4. ^ Ingebretsen, Robert B., Thomas G. Stockham, Jr., Random-Access Editing of Digital Audio, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Volume 32 Issue 3 pp. 114-122; March 1984.

External links

• Tom Stockham and Digital Audio Recording
• Commentary on Thomas Stockham
• IEEE Global History Network page on Thomas Stockham
• Article on the death of Thomas Stockham (free registration required)
• The "Expensive Tape Recorder" hack for the TX-0, which was the basis for Stockham's research

Persondata
Name	Stockham, Thomas
Alternative names
Short description	Digital audio pioneer
Date of birth	December 22, 1933
Place of birth
Date of death	January 6, 2004
Place of death