028 INTERVIEW
James Gordon, John Stadius, Helen Cullerton, David Webster
Soundout Labs, who under the technical stewardship of John Stadius had made a major impact on the burgeoning mobile DJ systems market around the turn of the decade. (Their sense of humour, adventure and blind optimism was apparent even then, as 33 years ago they allowed me to sail one of their new Soundcentres across the channel to the docks at Dieppe for an unlikely picture shoot - an incident remembered last month by John Stadius. Somehow the console was returned in full working order). Much as Billboard Magazine in New York overnight declared that ‘Disco is Dead’, Soundtracs followed suit, turning to the more grown-up activity of developing studio consoles and preparing Soundtracs for flotation, as the team’s success led to two decades of audio innovation and, in 1992, its first development of a digital audio mixing console. In 1996 this programme led to the launch of the acclaimed Virtua console, followed a year later by the DPC, in 1998 the DS3 and in 2000 the D4 - by which time the company had gone entirely digital. Along the way a host of new technologies had been introduced, including the first use by an audio manufacturer of the revolutionary and über-fast SHARC processor from Analog Devices (on Virtua), the first - and still the most comprehensive - use of multiple TFT LCD touchscreens, as well as becoming a pioneer in the use of a 96kHz sample rate, and the first to run multiple sample rates simultaneously. DiGiCo has always maintained a competitive edge since the D5 with that powerful DSP engine, and there’s never been a shortage of resellers wanting to buy into the franchise. The new generation SD series uses a single Super FPGA [Field Programmable Gate Array], combining this single chip technology with the new Tiger SHARC to deliver its acclaimed Stealth digital processing, which provides the most powerful digital audio solution available. James entered the fray in 1996, the year that Virtua was launched, introduced by a contact he met at Kingston University, the product development engineer David Gibbons. James had been working in the studio world, giving him a versatile knowledge of the consoles market; but he was ready for a change. “So I came in and looked at Virtua. In 1996, having come off working with clunky desks this was an amazing console for the money, sub £20k, 48 channels, 5.1 mixing. The team of people here just captured me and John Stadius is a very infectious person.” James later became a catalyst in the transition from Soundtracs to DiGiCo, recalling the epochal moment at the AES Show in Amsterdam in 1998, when Bob Doyle, then with Mark IV / Telex saw the DPC2 digital desk, with the platform that would change the course of engineering history. “Doyle swaggered over in his crocodile shoes and three quarter length jacket and he looked at me like some studio tosser and suddenly it was ‘fuck me!’ Bob fell in love with it immediately but what he realised was digital didn’t need to be complicated.” With post-production heading for the doldrums towards the end of the decade, Todd Wells was already looking for a way out and the solution was
www.mondodr.com
“While I bring the gung ho, youthful approach, Clive is very sagely. We had looked at many equity house
options, and ISIS fitted personality wise... it just felt like we would be working with a bigger Matrix.”
FPGA engine board
UB MADI
The SD7
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