Cinema Audio Society Launches Jeffrey S. Wexler Award for Advancement in Sound Technology
By HiFi Editorial16 February 2026
Key Highlights
Cinema Audio Society launches the Jeffrey S. Wexler Award for Advancement in Sound Technology, debuting in 2026 to honor non-linear sound recording, editing, and mixing innovations.
Inaugural 2026 recipients include Digidesign co-founders Evan Brooks and Peter Gotcher, and Zaxcom innovators Glen Sanders and Howard Stark, recognized for transformative audio technologies.
Evan Brooks developed Sound Designer and Sound Tools, the first affordable professional digital audio workstation, directly enabling Pro Tools’ emergence as an industry-standard DAW.
What makes the new Wexler Award compelling is how tightly it frames “advancement” around non‑linear thinking rather than raw sonic novelty. Early Digidesign tools shifted sound post from a tape-bound, destructive process into a random‑access domain where waveform editing, region-based assembly, and sample-accurate automation became the norm. That transition was less about pristine converters and more about changing how engineers —editing as data manipulation rather than physical splicing. In contrast, Zaxcom’s contribution attacked the other end of the signal chain, proving that file-based capture could survive hostile production environments while maintaining frame-accurate sync, stable metadata, and redundant recording—features that location mixers now take for granted. Together, these developments closed the loop between set and stage, creating a genuinely end-to-end digital workflow.
