Career
Watts spent a total of 35 years designing analog and digital audio recording consoles. Watts has worked at several major audio manufacturers including, in Woodinville, Washington, where he was the executive vice president of engineering from 1995 to 2002, and Trident Audio Developments in London, United Kingdom where he worked as head of Research and Development from 1976 to 1995. In 2003 Watts began his own company, Peter Watts Designs, Limited., in Hong Kong, China, which consulted to companies including Apogee Digital, Gibson Labs, Korg and Yorkville Sound.
At the age of 16, Watts began working at Trident on the mixer assembly line in their factory on the Shepperton Film Studios lot.
Toft liked the idea and it became the basis for the automation of the Trident Di-An (digitally controlled analog) mixer. Watts worked on most of Trident"s product line in various engineering roles, including as chief engineer on the VECTOR series large-format analog mixing console and the Di-An mixer.
In 1995 Watts moved to Seattle, Washington, as vice president of engineering for Company chairman Greg Clark Mackie had just taken the company public and Watts was tasked with the job to build a team to design Mackie"s first digital mixer, which resulted in the Mackie D8B Digital 8-Business mixing console, He also oversaw development of other products including the High-Dose-Rate-24 Hard Disk recorder, which targeted the fast-growing affordable nonlinear recording segment, and Mackie Control (formerly Logic Control) computer-based mixing controls.
