AES Student Blog

Meet Dave Hill one of our honorable judges of the Student Design Competition at AES138 in Warsaw.

Designer Dave Hill has always had an interest in electronics, and started designing and building devices at an early age. He was building analog synthesizers from scratch and started doing professional sound recording and equipment maintenance while still in high school. After high school Dave continued to pursue a career in electronics and enrolled in a local technical college. After his first year he was asked by the college to take over teaching duties in the program. He taught analog and digital electronics for 8 years while continuing his involvement in pro audio. 

Dave continues to do studio and film sound recording, as he has since 1972.  Early in the 1980's Dave was asked if he could design a tube compressor that would have the sound of vintage tube type devices.  The result of this request was the Summit Audio TLA-100.  Due to the success of that design Dave went on to design and set up the manufacture of all Summit Audio products until September of 1994.

Beginning in August of 1995, his new company Crane Song Ltd. was set up and started his first project for ATR Service Company.  A tube playback pre-amp for the ATR-102 tape machine called the HDV-2. This was manufactured for the ATR Service Company by Crane Song Ltd. Next Dave designed a two channel discrete class A compressor-limiter, called the STC-8 which was the launch of the Crane Song product line.

Today the Crane Song family of products has grown to nine hardware products and a Pro Tools plugin, they are; STC-8, Flamingo, Trakker, Ibis, Avocet, Egret, Spider, Falcon, Hedd-192, and Phoenix.

Dave Hill Designs was created as a way to do some different things and its two hardware products are Europa 1 and Titan which are both digital controlled analog devices. Dave Hill designs also has a ProTools plug-in called RA which allows the bending of linearity in the audio path and the creation of new sounds.

Some of the designs for other companies include Avid’s HEAT plug-in,  ATR Service Company’s variable speed control and the ARIA discrete record - play tape machine electronics.  In addition there is on-going design work for several other companies, both the US and the UK.  New designs for both Crane Song and Dave Hill Designs are always being worked on.  Plus research into clocking, jitter, digital control of analog audio and other areas.