Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 19 "The solution came to us in the form of Motorola's 56000 digital signal processor from a fellow named Terry Schultz, who used to work for E-mu. He called me up one day and said Motorola's got these new signal processing chips, they're not 8 or 16 or 32 bits like these other ones are, they're 24 bits—they're designed for audio. And they were looking for applications for them and thought we should check them out. And I said, you know, we're really a software company, we really don't do [hardware creation]." Even so, Terry sent Evan the development kit, the compilers, and the development board that had one of the chips on it. "At that time, Apple had come out with Macs that had NuBus slots. I put it all together and got it up and working, and it was fast—very, very fast! So, I ended up designing a pretty simple NuBus card that had a 56000 on it and one channel of 16-bit digital output, basically CD-quality output. I added hooks into the Sound Designer application so that when you went and tried to do a filtering operation, it would actually send all that stuff out to the card and do it in real time. So, you could hear the output from this nice 16-bit audio in mono—and it was so stunning. There could be such a difference in productivity because you suddenly had this real-time system that could process and monitor in real time and high quality. We decided to follow that whole thing and go with it." Around the same time, hard drives were becoming fast enough that stereo audio files could be played in real time, removing the need to load audio into memory before playing it back. Given these improvements, "We basically rewrote Sound Designer so that it became real time so you could sit there and record long segments of audio in and play them back out in real time. You could do non-linear, non-destructive editing and have real- time signal processing." The program, named Sound Tools, debuted at NAMM in January of 1989. "I think people were impressed. But it was very humbling," reveals Evan. "I remember I had given a demo to a recording veteran. I'm in my mid-20s and this guy must have been in his 70s or something, he's probably been doing this all his life, and he's very, very patient. He listens to the whole demo with me and at the end, he goes, 'Sonny, this is all very interesting, but you got it all backwards.' I looked at him and I couldn't quite figure out what he was getting at, and I asked, what do you mean we've got it all backwards? He says, 'Sonny, sound doesn't go from left to right—it goes from right to left.'" Visually, the audio was playing back from left to right— like you'd read a book. "This is something that just makes total sense to us, because we hadn't spent our life with tape. But for somebody who spent their life with tape, it's a complete paradigm shift. It was a completely different way of thinking and visualizing the whole world in which [audio engineers] lived in, because if you're [working with] tape, sound and time go from right to left." Recalling how I would see Digidesign audio interfaces on Avid Media Composer systems when I first started in post in 1995, I asked about that relationship with Avid. "We had this sound card that we really used as an accelerator. People would have a Sound Designer system and they weren't really recording and editing non-linearly, necessarily, but they were just using it to accelerate things. We OEM'd this card and sent it out to a number Sound Tools hardware and software as featured in Sound On Sound, August, 1989.