1998: IBC Awards - Audio R&D Engineer of the Year

David Kirby.

David Kirby has been a major influence in audio engineering for more than a decade. Having started work on audio editing systems, he moved on to assess the use of multichannel sound in broadcasting. Later, he co-ordinated tests which led to the acceptance of MPEG Advanced Audio Coding as a new international standard.

Kirby also worked on techniques to maintain synchronisation of audio and video in post-production and the mix-minus system -- which overcomes the problem of delayed feeds for off-air cueing and commentaries. Currently, Kirby is exploring speech recognition technology in broadcasting. This is likely to impact on the fields of video and audio editing in the near future. The judges stressed this work, saying that the award was for "his great contribution towards developing technologies of the future".