Sony Pro Audio
Japan commissioned the setting up of an independent UK design group
in 1988 – Oxford Digital (to become Sony Oxford in 1993), their
main project being to create the OXF-R3. The original 5 took care of
the overall look & feel, and was responsible for all operational
aspects. For example, Paul Frindle designed all visual aspects right
down to component level detail.
Paul Frindle is a
cofounder of Oxford Digital Ltd. Their first contract was with Sony
(who would eventually take over the company), developing the
application design of Sony’s flagship digital mixing console. The
result of this work was the OXF-R3, to this day regarded as the
pinnacle of digital mixing consoles, not only in music, but also in
film. Like everything Paul has worked on, as much of a landmark as
the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be but merely a stepping stone. Where
it was leading, however, could have been much different.
“I think there
was a fantastic opportunity to revive the large studio concept, by
integrating non-linear storage and editing into the OXF-R3,” Paul
says. “It was already a massively-powerful workstation, wide open
[enough] to accept it. This would have been amazingly powerful and
creative, and would have knocked underpowered workstations off the
map for many years to come, restoring a much-needed differential to
the elite studios against the upcoming project studios.”
The OXF-R3 has
only continued to blur that line in favor of the project studios.
Strapped for the kind of clients who could appreciate — let alone
could afford — high-end studios, the great studios of their time
have faded away one by one. If those studios could have stayed on the
leading edge of digital tech, would it have been enough to halt those
closures? We may never know. Fortunately for all studio buffs,
high-end and project alike, there was another avenue of exploration
left for Paul that would give his work the broadest audience to date.
“The design of
the OXF-R3 was amazingly ahead of time. It was a great big, highly
flexible processor with a whole load of software running on it, which
was restricted and presented on a panel just for conformity and
convenience. It was already ‘software in a box’. It could even be
controlled remotely. All of the design systems and debugging tools I
was using on it consisted of on-screen GUIs.” This was a dramatic,
yet understated shift from the way technical engineers had previously
worked. It was a physical product, but the brains of it was moving
into the virtual space.
“I was warning
that the OXF-R3 product concept was obsolete even before we finished
it. The large digital tape recorder was nothing more than a very
costly and highly delicate ‘bit bucket’ organised like an
analogue machine. With the meteoric rise in performance of digital
technology, it was fairly easy to envisage a time when a unit bought
for £1000 would be capable of doing a large chuck of what a mixer
needed. In the near future, we would be able to make art without all
this paraphernalia, at a miniscule fraction of the cost. I was far
more excited about this than doggedly hanging onto established
formats and design constraints.”
Not one to let
this excitement lay dormant, Paul and a few others started their own
pursuit. “The plug-ins project was initially hatched from humble
beginnings, almost by us working in our spare time and at nights. My
colleague actually did the first proof of concept EQ plug-in over the
Christmas break and it all grew from that.
“What people
needed most were high-quality, refined and indispensable
applications; the EQ and Dynamics were adapted to provide that.
Making them identical to the OXF-R3 applications was a link to our
existing reputation. Of course running these in 48bits for TDM or
double float in RTAS actually provided better performance than was
available in the OXF-R3 32-bit, fixed-point environment. And it has
to be said that we ironed out a few bugs along the way too, so these
were actually better than the applications in the large format
console.”
For users, this
resulted in what are still being called the best equalizer and
dynamics processing plug-ins on the market. For Sony, however, the
greatest deliverable was the system they built to create both the
OXF-R3 and the plugins. “It was a complete hierarchical graphic
design system running on a specially-designed processor, which
allowed real-time interaction and analysis of the action for almost
every instruction in your processing design!” If this description
sounds familiar, it is because what Paul is describing is a modular
environment for signal processing, much like tools like Max/MSP,
AudioMulch and Plogue Bidule.
“Not only did
it allow engineers without formal programming skills to build highly
complex applications, it also very crucially allowed us to experiment
freely and actually listen to what was happening in real time! It was
this system that enabled me to delve so deeply into what we could
hear and why, exploit that knowledge and realise the applications for
the OXF-R3 console and subsequently the Sony Oxford plug-ins. Quite
simply, I was able to ‘play around’ with all sorts of wacky
processing models to get the behaviour that matched the all-important
sounds in my head.”
This freedom of
experimentation allowed Paul to move from traditional audio utilities
like EQ’s and dynamics processors into more creative arenas. “The
Transmod was something that I have always wanted since the mid-1970s,
and over the decades had tried on several occasions to make out of
analogue technology. But it was doomed to failure because of the
relatively poor accuracy and stability of [analogue] components.
During a lunchtime, I knocked up a digital version of my old idea as
proof of concept, and it just worked!
“The Inflator
came about because I received a late night call from a friend who had
been doing high-profile sessions in L.A. with Eric Clapton and BB
King. He had slogged away for months doing recordings and mixes, but
had been beaten into production by another engineer who managed to
make it louder. He wanted to know if there was anything he could
possibly do to make it louder without wrecking the sound completely.
I was reminded that I had to make my first transistor power amp
design in 1970 twice as powerful as the previous tube amp design to
get the same volume and impact. All I had to do was to apply all this
old knowledge into a digital process and the same effect would be
available. I used a combination of math packages and the OX-R3 design
system to experiment and extract the salient details of what made the
tube amp louder. This was definitely a walk on the wild side, since
for the first time in this employment I was making something whose
sole purpose was to generate a heap of distortion!”
After leaving
Sony Oxford, Paul set out on his own again to further explore the
creative possibilities opening up through digital audio. The result
is his latest venture Pro Audio DSP. “This initiative was
conceived as a way of getting this stuff done without too much
interference from marketing executives and sales infrastructures.”