Background
Professor Stockham was born in Passaic, New Jersey.
Professor Stockham was born in Passaic, New Jersey.
Stockham attended Montclair Kimberley Academy, graduating in the class of 1951. Known as the "father of digital recording", he earned an Doctor of Science. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and was appointed Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering.
While at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he noticed several of the students using an Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory Texas-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/Doctorate-Doctorate/A converter attached to the Texas-0. This expensive tape recorder led Stockham to his own digital audio experiments on this same computer in 1962. In 1968 he left Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the University of Utah, and in 1975 founded Soundstream, Incorporated.
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.
lieutenant ran at a sampling rate of 50 kHz, as opposed to the audio Civil Defense sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. Soundstream Incorporated. 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. 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 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers paper.
These recordings were the first to be digitally restored by computer, and were released on the album Caruso - A Legendary Performer, issued in 1976 by Radio Corporation of America Records. In 1974 he investigated President Richard Nixon"s White House tapes. lieutenant 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.
Stockham"s developments and contributions to digital audio paved the way for later digital audio technologies, such as the audio compact disc and DAT (Digital Audio Tape). Stockham received wide recognition for his pioneering contributions to digital audio.