The Sound Guy, Inc., a privately held corporation based in Silicon Valley, California, is the manufacturer of SFX Machine RT, SFX Machine Pro, Backwards Machine, ChatterBlocker and ReSpatializer. The company's software has been bundled with products by BIAS, Cakewalk, Digidesign, E-mu, PreSonus and others.
A distributed company, The Sound Guy, Inc. has developers and researchers in Saratoga, Stanford, San Francisco and Santa Barbara, California; Massachusetts; Florida; Singapore and Romania. The sun never sets on The Sound Guy, but we might be inside or something.
Our software has won awards including Electronic Musician's Editor's Choice (Best DSP Plug-In, 1998; Best Signal Processing Software, 2007), Mac Life's Editor's Choice award (2007), MacWorld U.K.'s Editor's Choice (2007), and Keyboard Magazine's Key Buy award. SFX Machine can be heard on a number of commercial music recordings, feature films, television productions and video games. It was originally developed based on the author's experience in the field of video game sound design.
Earl Vickers, founder and CEO of The Sound Guy, Inc., is an audio engineer, programmer, musician and product developer. He holds patent #4,475,228 and has others pending. He has done sound design and/or music composition for arcade games such as Star Wars, Tron, Gauntlet and 720°, including two of the top ten favorite coin-operated games of all time. He has worked at companies such as Bally Midway, Atari Games Corporation, Time Warner Interactive, Aureal, and Creative Labs Advanced Technology Center. His short stories have been published in three languages.
Mr. Vickers is a member of the AES and IEEE. In 2001, he chaired a session on Production and Studio Issues at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York, and he presented a signal processing paper at the October 2006 AES Convention in San Francisco.
SFX Machine: Designed and programmed by Earl Vickers
SFX Machine RT: Programmed by Sophia Poirier (based on SFX Machine) & Earl Vickers
SFX Machine Pro: Programmed by Hampus Soderstrom (based on SFX Machine RT) & Earl Vickers
Backwards Machine: Programmed by Sophia Poirier (based on SFX Machine RT)
ReSpatializer: Programmed by Chris Bennett and Dan Harris.
For a list of intellectual property available for license, see our IP page.
For a list of internships and job openings, see our jobs page.