Chair - Steve Turnidge

Steve Turnidge is a noted mastering engineer at UltraViolet Studios with dozens of albums and thousands of licensed music tracks to his credit. His latest project is to co-produce, design and master Beautiful Escape: The Songs of The Posies Revisited for Burning Sky Records.

He has over 20 years experience in the Pro Audio electronics industry specializing in mixed digital and analog printed circuit board design (with a specialty in FireWire audio designs), and is currently designing for Open Labs, among others. Steve taught a year of Audio Recording at Shoreline Community College and sits on their Music Tech Advisory Committee.

In addition to being the current Vice-Chairman of the PNW Section Audio Engineering Society committee, Steve is a voting member of the Recording Academy and plays bass in The Nervous Freemasons.

Enjoy Steve's videos and artwork.

Vice-Chair - Rick Chinn

Rick is It at Uneeda Audio, a pro-audio consultancy, and has served the PNW section in various capacities since its inception over 25 years ago. He served as volunteer and technical liaison for the 14th International Conference in 1997, volunteer at the 121st Convention in 2006, and AES Standards SC05-05 and SC-05-02 since 2000. He has been a panelist for the 2005 Live Sound For Jazz presentation and the 2003 Grounding and Shielding Tutorial at the 114th Convention in Amsterdam. In addition to his Section work, he is a consultant specializing in audio systems design and troubleshooting, live sound mixing, recording, technical writing, and web design..

Previously, Rick has worked for nearly every pro audio company in the local area, the sound crew at Seattle Center, and is currently working on projects for Benaroya Hall, Teatro Zinzanni, and several area churches. Rick is also a freelance live and studio mixing engineer as well as the current PNW AES webmaster. He holds one US Patent as well as Commercial Radiotelephone and Amateur Radio licenses. He does not do ladders, lights, or video.
www.uneeda-audio.com 

Secretary - Gary Louie

Gary has been the recording engineer for the University of Washington School of Music since 1979, previously earning his BSEE at the UW. He has served as AES PNW Section Chair, Vice Chair, Committee, and most recently, Secretary since 1993. Gary is also the co-author, with Glenn White, of the Audio Dictionary 3rd Ed.

Treasurer - Dave Franzwa

Dave has been employed in the audio manufacturing industry in the Seattle area since 1979, having worked at TAPCO, Carver, Spectral, and currently at Mackie where he is Technical Documentation Manager. He graduated from Cogswell College North in 1995 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronics Engineering Technology. He enjoys playing music and working with audio and sound reinforcement equipment in his spare time.

Committee - Rob Baum

Rob received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, and an MBA from New York University in 1990. After college he was an audio engineer at CBS Records, where he worked at a manufacturing facility establishing quality control standards and procedures for the manufacture of records and tapes. Later, at Apogee Sound, a professional loudspeaker manufacturer, he worked between manufacturing and engineering on pro audio speakers. At Menlo Scientific, he undertook a wide range of consulting projects in transducer materials, design, manufacture, and test and measurement - mainly for large factories in Asia on behalf of American clients, as well as focussing on the test and measurement of transducers and systems. For several years, Menlo Scientific sold SYSid, a two channel analyzer originally designed for internal use at AT&T Bell Labs.

In the business arena, Rob has consulted for a variety of clients within the audio supply chain, such as firms looking for help introducing new materials, intellectual property (such as signal processing or novel ICs), market analysis or simply finding an appropriate manufacturer in Asia. Clients included material manufacturers, component suppliers, as well as system suppliers across multiple markets: pro audio, hi-fi, home theater, consumer electronics, musical instrument, commercial and portable sound.

Recently Rob's work has swung towards personal audio: design and testing of headsets and headphone speakers and microphones, as parts and as systems working together. Rob has written for a variety of audio trade magazines for over a decade, including "Sound and Communications", "Voice Coil" and "Multi Media Manufacturer". Rob is currently working as a contract engineer for Microsoft.

Committee - Kevin D. Jablonski

Kevin is an attorney whose practice involves several aspects of intellectual property law including patent procurement, copyrights, and trademarks. He is registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office and admitted to practice law in Washington State. He is a member of the Recording Academy: Engineer's and Producers Wing, the Audio Engineering Society, the American Bar Association, and the Washington State Patent Law Association. He can boast experience in technology areas such as computer networking, digital communication systems, microelectronic design, computer-related business methods, interactive software solutions, aircraft communication systems, and computer architecture solutions. Kevin recently earned an Audio Production degree from The Art Institute of Seattle, plays in an 11-piece Soul Band and is currently building a recording studio.

Committee - James D. (JJ) Johnston

James received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1975 and 1976 respectively.

JJ temporarily retired in 2002 but worked 26 years for AT&T Bell Labs and its successor AT&T Labs Research. He was one of the first investigators in the field of perceptual audio coding, one of the inventors and standardizers of MPEG 1/2 audio Layer 3 and MPEG-2 AAC, as well as the AT&T Bell Labs or AT&T Labs-Research PXFM (perceptual transform coding) and PAC (perceptual audio coding) and the ASPEC algorithm that provided the best audio quality in the MPEG-1 audio tests.

Most recently he has been working in the area of auditory perception of soundfields, ways to capture soundfield cues and represent them, and ways to expand the limited sense of realism available in standard audio playback for both captured and synthetic performances. He is currently employed by Neural Audio.

Mr. Johnston is an IEEE Fellow, and AES Fellow, a NJ Inventor of the Year, an AT&T Technical Medalist and Standards Awardee, and a co-recipient of the IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award. Mr. Johnston was a presenter at the 2004 AES Section Meeting, "From Hear to Infinity." In 2006, he received James L. Flanagan Signal Processing Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Soceity.

Committee - Mark Rogers

Mark is Director of the AV Department at the Greenbusch Group, a Seattle acoustical consulting firm. He is a designer of audio/visual systems, including sound reinforcement, audio reproduction, video projection and displays, videoconferencing and audioconferencing, and related control systems. Typical projects include corporate boardrooms, convention centers, universities and hospitals. He has designed and installed AV for 30 years, and also teaches classes and seminars on AV technology. He is a registered Professional Engineer (Idaho) and earned his BSEE at the University of Idaho. He is a past Vice Chair and Committee member of the PNW AES Section and has presented several topics to the section.

Committee - Dr. Ivan Tashev

Dr. Tashev works on creation of novel sound capturing and sound rendering devices and audio processing algorithms at Microsoft Research. He created and implemented the algorithm for the microphone array support in Windows Vista. He has published more than 60 scientific papers and has 34 submissions for US patents. Four of them have already been granted and all are in the area of novel audio processing algorithms. He holds the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (1990) and the Masters Degree in Electronics (1984), both from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Last modified 6/10/2008.