David Blackmer

had a pretty clear-cut vision -- he wanted to make the recording process easier and the results sound better. As founder of both dbx and Earthworks, there's little doubt that David, who passed away March 21, 2002 at 75 years old, realized his dream.

David started his audio career at the bottom -- as a stock boy at Lafayette Radio in the 1940s, where he used his ingenuity to quickly make a name for himself. "The story goes," states Eric Blackmer, David's son and director of sales and marketing for Earthworks, "that he fixed a pile of malfunctioning radios that nobody else could. He had been building radios since age 10. From a very early age he was a problem solver and inventor. It was his life-long passion to improve the quality of audio equipment until it approached the sound of the original source."

David later joined the Navy, where he learned radar electronics. From there, his studies took him to Harvard and MIT. After college, he took jobs at Trans-Radio Recording Studio, Epsco, Hi-Con Eastern, and Raytheon, where he was involved in developing telemetry circuits that would be used in the Mercury space program.

In 1971 David founded dbx, the company, and invented dbx, the noise reduction system. His goal was to find something that would make music easier to record. His results changed audio production forever.

"The idea behind dbxwas based on the idea of using decibel expansion to replace the peaks lost to the limited dynamic range of magnetic tape," continues Eric Blackmer. "It led to much more. The Blackmer VCA and RMS detector changed the world of audio, yielding the dbx noise reduction system, dbx compressors, and the dbx subsonic synthesizer."

dbx's initial offering, the classic 160 compressor/limiter, quickly became a studio standard. Even today, many of the top studios use original 160's, while some variation of the original -- the 165, the 160X, and the 160XT -- live in racks throughout the world.

When he founded Earthworks, David's goal was to upgrade the entire audio chain to a new standard of sonic realism. Though the products produced by Earthworks are diverse -- from microphones to preamps to monitors -- they share a similar characteristic: they are all designed to be extremely accurate. According to Eric Blackmer, "In the last years of his life he developed a new model for human hearing that includes the importance of time-domain resolution. He strove to establish new standards of sonic realism."

There is no doubt that he has left an indelible mark on recorded sound. Eric Blackmer sums it up best by saying, "By example, David Blackmer encouraged many in the audio industry to aspire to a higher standard of excellence than anyone might have known was possible. He often derived the inverse of impossible to come up with elegant solutions that everyone else had missed, as he always pushed the envelope.

"He will be missed by many."