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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.
Different perspectives emerge when comparing studio-centric innovation with production-first engineering. Digidesign’s early systems were constrained by host CPU power, SCSI bandwidth, and fixed-point math, yet they introduced concepts like non-destructive editing and recallable mixes that remain foundational even in today’s floating‑point, object-based ecosystems. Zaxcom’s portable recorders, by comparison, prioritized clock stability, power efficiency, and thermal reliability, often at the expense of interface luxury. The technical philosophy was pragmatic rather than elegant: rock-solid timecode, deterministic file integrity, and multitrack reliability trumped screen real estate or UI polish. That divergence highlights why the award spans both camps—true progress in sound comes from aligning creative flexibility with uncompromising signal discipline.
Naming the award after Jeff Wexler subtly reinforces that balance. His reputation was never about fetishizing gear, but about deploying technology as a transparent extension of intent—clean gain staging, disciplined monitoring, and early adoption only when it solved real problems. The Wexler Award, by design, avoids celebrating novelty for novelty’s sake; it honors tools that disappear into the workflow while raising the technical ceiling. For engineers debating converters versus clocks or DAWs versus recorders, the message is clear: lasting impact in audio comes from systems that reshape process, not just specs.
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