Mark Davies TSL Director of products and technology
Tell us about how you ended up working in the audio space. I was intrigued by audio and TV from an early age. I love music, but have no musical talent whatsoever, so I had to find other outlets for this interest. Like many in my generation, I started with my parents’ radio and record player, making mix tapes when I got my first compact cassette recorder. Then I discovered things could be improved by building your own equipment. This progressed to running a mobile disco and managing local bands. My first job out of university was with Pro-Bel, a router manufacturer. One of my first tasks was preparing an audio router for testing by a new UK broadcaster, Channel 4. It was a stereo 64x64 router, filling two full equipment bays, combined with video and timecode levels. This was one of the biggest routers made at the time, in 1982. Tasks included hand trimming capacitors to cancel interchannel crosstalk. Ever since, I’ve worked in the broadcast equipment manufacturing industry, with companies including Snell & Wilcox, Omnitek, Miranda, Grass Valley and now TSL. When I was offered the role at TSL, its leading position in the field of audio monitoring was one of the main attractions. What is one piece of advice you would give to anyone hoping to start out in audio? Let your passion for all things audio drive you. This will see you through the challenging times and make your achievements even more rewarding. Toughest professional challenge you’ve overcome? This must be the design of video standards converters, an area where art meets science. It involves measuring motion, working out where you are in space and time and having to make real-time decisions on which filter aperture to use to generate the best output picture. What’s this got to do with audio I hear you ask? Well in standards conversion there will come a time when you have to decide to drop or invent a frame of video. This has big consequences for audio. In order to maintain lip sync, the audio must transition over this disjointed event in the video – but in a seamless way, using rate conversion. We can’t just drop a frame of audio, the ear is a much more sensitive instrument than the eye.
What is your most essential piece of kit? A 1kHz sine wave generator and an oscilloscope.
What audio technologies are you excited about for the future? I look forward to a day when all audio can be delivered uncompressed. That’s the audiophile in me. I’m also excited about object-based audio. This is one of the few areas where I feel the tools we can deliver as technologists are running ahead of the creative community’s ability to fully realise what is possible.
It’s time to talk sound. From AI-powered microphones and delivery over IP to the growing noise around immersive audio, it’s an area boasting a myriad of tech
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