“I know, like, Apple Music is offering that, so you don’t have to have anything but a pair of headphones in order to listen to most music. And it’s even possible on some computers. I know, like, Apple MacBook Pros, if you just play through the speakers in the computer, it’s astonishing. It gives it, it’s got DSP built in that, just, basically, it sounds like the mix is all around you. So, yeah. So that, wow, and none of those things are possible with, um, you know, the classic, you know, surround formats, which is one of the reasons I think that Atmos is going to probably, um, you know, catch on a lot more, more readily than those did.” -- Jeff Bohnhoff

This episode’s guest is a musician, audio engineer, and producer. He’s been performing and recording with Maya, his musical partner and wife, for over forty years, and he’s produced more than twenty albums for various artists. His name is Jeff Bohnhoff, and this week’s discussion about the power of sound and music, the changes in recording from analog to digital, and his thoughts about the future of audio with the rise of Dolby Atmos, make for a fascinating discussion. If you’re an audio engineer or just interested in where audio tech is taking us, this discussion’s bound to be inspirational!

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(0:00:00) – Early Memories of Musical Influence

The conversation starts off with a look back at Jeff’s memories of sound, from the toy record player of his childhood to the rock albums of his teenage years. “I remember just kind of lying there,” he says, “and wishing to myself, ‘Man, I wish I could create something like that.’" He tells us about receiving his first guitar, and how, despite a rough start, it led to bigger and better things. “I wasn’t any good,” he recalls, “I was terrible. But I was stubborn, and then I saved up some money and bought a better guitar, and it just kind of went from there.”

(0:04:41) – A Musician’s Early Career

We talk about his first band and the chance meeting that led to both his second band and meeting his future wife, Maya. “We were doing a lot of cover songs,” Jeff tells us. “We were playing like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Rush, stuff like that.” He explains how MIDI controllers had just begun to shake up the music industry around that same time, and how they sparked his fascination with early electronic music and digital audio’s ability to create true one-person performances. “I was doing electronic music,” he says, “but I wasn’t really doing what you would think of as electronic music. I was trying to recreate the...