CAS Quarterly

C A S Q U A R T E R L Y I S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 67 introduced Sound Devices to a whole new customer base of production mixers doing narrative work, where the 442 and 302 field mixers were more broadcast-oriented. The 744T also helped accelerate the transition industry-wide from analog and digital tape-based recording to file-based recording. The 744T was Sound Devices' first product where all mixing, summing, and routing was done in digital versus analog. Since then, Sound Devices has continued to introduce products or improvements to workflows that have allowed the company's footprint to grow. How does the company decide where to invest its resources? I like to describe the world of production sound as one that is "an inch wide and a mile deep." We all know live sound mixers and music recording mixers who have little knowledge of our craft and our tools. And what our customers are asked to do continues to be more challenging, both operationally and technologically. The challenge of deciding where to put money and manpower is the most difficult, and important, for the company. Some products are logical extensions of what has come before, but some products are things that no one ever asked for, but we believe there is customer benefit. Our single-ended noise-suppression plugin, NoiseAssist, is an example of the latter. Steve Popovich and Matt Anderson worked on NoiseAssist for several years before its introduction. No one was asking for it, but even in its earliest form, we saw its benefit for real time applications. NoiseAssist wouldn't be possible Sound Devices co-founder Matt Anderson accepts the award. without the computational power on the 8-Series and MixPre II recorders. The recorders were developed knowing that, in the future, they would offer features that have yet to be defined. When developing the CL-16, were you thinking of a target production sound mixer? Our earliest recorder, the 744T, was designed primarily for the

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