About Sonic Studio

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Since the early 1980s, Sonic Studio workstations have been adopted worldwide by motion picture and recording studios, major record labels and high end mastering facilities. On award–winning motion picture soundtracks and more than half of all commercially released CD, Sonic Studio’s customers consistently win Grammy®, Emmy® and Oscar® awards for their exceptional audio work. Sonic Studio continues to lead the way to the ultrafidelity computer based audio of with the Amarra computer music player.

Sonic Studio History

Overview

Started in 1987 Sonic Solutions and the Sonic Studio audio workstation have driven the professional production and delivery of commercial Compact Discs, DVD, and SACD. The original “Sonic System”pioneered the desktop delivery of Red Book masters on recordable CD and DDP. To this day, over half of every commercially released CD titles is most likely mastered on a Sonic Studio workstation. Sonic Studio’s NoNOISE™ noise reduction tools for sound production and restoration for television and film are known for their excellence and has earned an Emmy™ for its role in the restoration of thousands of films and records.

The Early Years

Our first product the Sonic System was designed by James A. Moorer , and was called the the SoundDroid and was developed in 1980 as in–house project of Lucasfilm’s Ltd.’s subsidiary The Droid Works. The development team went on to start Sonic Solutions and create the NoNOISE restoration system in 1987, hosted on a Motorola–powered SUN 1. Our products soundBlade and Amarra are the 10th generation of this original design.

At just about this time a small company called Apple released the Macintosh II. This became the platform for the first version of the Sonic System. By 1988, the Sonic System was in service at EMI Abbey Road and Finesplice in London, and MCA in California, performing “miraculous” feats of restoration and starting a trend of mining back catalogue that continues to this day.

Many Sonic firsts followed:

• NoNoise: first Noise Reduction System (1987)
• The Sonic System: first CD Production System (1989)
• MediaNet: first network designed for guaranteed media (1994)
• Sonic Studio HD: first full 24 bit 96 / 192 kHz workstation (1997)
• DSD.1: first DSD Production System (1999)
• Amarra: first high resolution consumer player (2008)

The Present Day

In 2002, Sonic Solutions started a joint venture with Sonic Studio, LLC to carry on the development, sales, and support of Sonic Solutions’ audio workstation products. In 2004, Sonic Studio released its first Native OS X application, SonicStudio•DDP. This was followed in 2006 by PreMaster CD, and in 2007 soundBlade was released as a modern version of the Sonic Studio HD workstation of the ’90s.

In 2008, Sonic Studio began work on a new consumer product. Amarra was the first high resolution music player specifically designed to improve the sound of computer–based playback. As the Amarra family evolves, Sonic Studio is poised to lead the way in high resolution audio playback for the home.

Today, our offices are located in California’s Marin County, just steps away from where the original digital audio workflow research began at Lucasfilm. Sonic Studio, LLC continues to lead the industry in fidelity, value and ease of use. Our product lines address the needs of the world’s most discriminating listeners. The Sonic Studio range remains the standard for both professional audio production and home–based computer music players.

Select Papers of Interest

48-Bit Integer Processing Beats 32-Bit Floating Point — James A. Moorer. Presented at the 107th AES Convention, September 1999, Preprint 5038 (L-3)

Breaking the Sound Barrier: Mastering at 96 kHz and Beyond — James A. Moorer. Presented at the 101st AES Convention, November 1996, Preprint 4357 (I-2)

Soundworks: An Object-Oriented Distributed System for Digital Sound — Jonathan Reichbach, Author. First network based system for Audio Editing and Playback. Readings in Computer-Generated Music, IEEE Computer Society Press 1992