| Thomas Stockham | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 22, 1933 |
| Died | January 6, 2004 (aged 70) |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | MIT |
| Awards | Grammy |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electrical engineering |
| Institutions | Soundstream University of Utah |
| Doctoral students | Raphael Rom Olivier Faugeras |
Thomas Greenway Stockham (December 22, 1933 – January 6, 2004) was an American scientist who developed one of the first practical digital audio recording systems, and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing as well.
Digital audio is sound that has been recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is encoded as numerical samples in continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samples are taken 44100 times per second each with 16 bit sample depth. Digital audio is also the name for the entire technology of sound recording and reproduction using audio signals that have been encoded in digital form. Following significant advances in digital audio technology during the 1970s, it gradually replaced analog audio technology in many areas of audio engineering and telecommunications in the 1990s and 2000s.
Stockham was born in Passaic, New Jersey. [1] Stockham attended Montclair Kimberley Academy, graduating in the class of 1951. [2] Known as the "father of digital recording", he earned an Sc.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and was appointed Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. Early in his academic career at MIT, Stockham worked closely with Amar Bose, founder of Bose Corporation, on the use of digital computers for measurement and simulation of room acoustics and for audio recording and enhancement. 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 expensive tape recorder led Stockham to his own digital audio experiments on this same computer in 1962.
Passaic is a city in Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city had a total population of 69,781, maintaining its status as the 15th largest municipality in New Jersey with an increase of 1,920 residents (+2.8%) from the 2000 Census population of 67,861, which had in turn increased by 9,820 (+16.9%) from the 58,041 counted in the 1990 Census. Passaic is the tenth most densely populated municipality in the entire United States with 22,000+ people per square mile.
Montclair Kimberley Academy (MKA) is a co-educational private school for students in pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade located in Montclair in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. One of New Jersey's largest independent day schools, Montclair Kimberley Academy celebrated the 125th anniversary of the establishment of its earliest component school in 2012. The current school, established in 1974, is the result of the merger of three separate schools: Montclair Academy, a boys' school founded in 1887; The Kimberley School, a girls' school founded in 1906; and Brookside, a coed school founded in 1925.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. The institute is traditionally known for its research and education in the physical sciences and engineering, but more recently in biology, economics, linguistics and management as well. MIT is often ranked among the world's top five universities.
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.
The University of Utah is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. As the state's flagship university, the university offers more than 100 undergraduate majors and more than 92 graduate degree programs. The university is classified among "R-1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity" with "selective" admissions. Graduate studies include the S.J. Quinney College of Law and the School of Medicine, Utah's first medical school. As of Fall 2015, there are 23,909 undergraduate students and 7,764 graduate students, for an enrollment total of 31,673.
Soundstream Inc. was the first audiophile digital audio recording company, providing commercial services for recording and computer-based editing.
Honeywell International Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate company that makes a variety of commercial and consumer products, engineering services and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments. The company operates four business units, known as Strategic Business Units – Honeywell Aerospace, Home and Building Technologies (HBT), Safety and Productivity Solutions (SPS), and Honeywell Performance Materials and Technologies.
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.[ clarification needed ] 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. [3] These acoustic recordings were the first to be digitally restored by computer, and were released on the album Caruso - A Legendary Performer, issued in 1976 by RCA Records.
Enrico Caruso was an Italian operatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles from the Italian and French repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. Caruso also made approximately 260 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. All of these recordings, which span most of his stage career, remain available today on CDs and as downloads and digital streams.
In 1974, he investigated President Richard Nixon's White House tapes, alongside fellow members of the panel of persons nominated jointly by the White House and the Special Prosecution Force. It was he who discovered that the 18 minutes of erasures were not accidental, as Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods claimed. Stockham was able to discern several distinct erasures and even determined the order of erasure.
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States from 1969 to 1974. He had previously served as the 36th vice president of the United States from 1953 to 1961, and prior to that as both a U.S. representative and senator from California.
Stockham's team reached agreement on seven conclusions detailed in their 87-page report to Chief Judge John J. Sirica:
1. The erasing and recording operations that produced the buzzsection were done directly on the evidence tape.
2. The Uher 5000 recorder designated Government Exhibit #60 probably produced the entire buzz section.
3. The erasures and buzz recordings were done in at least five, and perhaps as many as nine, separate and contiguous segments.
4. Erasure and recording of each segment required hand operation of keyboard controls on the Uher 5000 machine.
5. Erased portions of the tape probably contained speech originally.
6. Recovery of the speech is not possible by any method known to us.
7. The evidence tape, insofar as we have determined, is an original and not a copy. [4]
Stockham's developments and contributions to digital audio paved the way for later digital audio technologies, such as the audio compact disc and 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 in 1987, a Technical Emmy award in 1988, the Poniatoff Gold Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, [5] a Grammy award from NARAS in 1994, the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal in 1998 [6] and a Scientific and Engineering award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1999. [7]
