BATON ROUGE, LA — PreSonus announced that its chief technology officer, Bob Tudor died May 23. Tudor, born in 1967, was a child prodigy. He attended both the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Berklee College of Music before combining both his passion for music and technology at Mackie Designs, then SaneWave, his own venture. With SaneWave, Tudor collaborated on projects with many audio manufacturers. He joined PreSonus full time in 2008.
A legend in the pro audio/MI industry, Tudor followed a long and winding road to PreSonus. A child prodigy, he studied piano with Arthur Rubinstein protégé and Julliard fellow Josephine Bacher. Tudor later studied electrical engineering at the prestigious Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute but switched to the Berklee College of Music, where he studied film scoring, jazz, and music production. He co-founded Boston’s Metropolis recording studio and recorded such well-known acts as Peter Wolf / J. Geils Band, Extreme, Aime Mann, New Kids on the Block, and Bobby Brown. He also played keyboards and acoustic piano on numerous records as a studio musician and remixed “Cradle of Love” for Billy Idol.
Fascinated with how gear worked, Bob eventually combined his passions for music and engineering, creating a long list of companies, products, and technologies. As one of the pioneers at Mackie Designs, he created the company’s line of digital mixers, hard-disk recorders, and control surfaces.
“Bob was a genius — pure and simple,” said Front of House editor George Petersen. “Years ago, I was visiting Mackie while he was working on the development of the d8b (Digital 8-bus) mixer.” The console essentially combined a mix worksurface and under the hood was a Pentium motherboard, power supply and a rear panel filled with I/O and DSP cards connected to the CPU. “From the standpoint of simplicity, it was a brilliant design. The board used Windows, but just for housekeeping and to store/recall setups and console/effects presets to a small hard disk. While I was there, one of the project managers lamented that Mackie had to pay Microsoft $50 for the Windows license on each mixer, a cost that would have to passed on to the customers. Hearing that, Tudor was incensed. He stayed late at work, pulling an all-nighter. The next morning he showed off a custom operating system he wrote, which negated the need to run Windows. Problem solved!”
“Bob Tudor’s design work and personal influence at Mackie was big to say the least,” added Mackie senior VP John Boudreau. “Bob’s vision for bringing digital technology and intuitive tools for recording led to the innovative Mackie d8b and HDR products, among many others. A talented musician and recording enthusiast himself, he combined this with his skills as a digital engineer to design with true passion. It’s safe to say Bob helped reshape Mackie recording, which created a huge community of dedicated enthusiasts for these products and the brand. Bob’s big, fun personality was part of Mackie’s culture in the office and often extended after hours where many napkin sketches became the impetus for these insanely killer products. He will be missed by the Mackie community.”
After leaving Mackie, Tudor founded SaneWave, where he developed products for a wide assortment of pro audio manufacturers. Overall, Tudor and the SaneWave team had designed more than 100 products, including such hits as the TASCAM US-2400 Control Surface and X-48 Hard Disk Multitrack Audio Recorder, Electro-Voice DC-1 Speaker Processor, M-Audio ProjectMix, and Lexicon MX-500 FX Processor. He did additional projects for QSC, Samson, Shure, Alesis, Gibson, Fender, and many others. One of SaneWave’s best clients was PreSonus, for which he helped define and design the FaderPort and the StudioLive digital-mixer line. That led to his decision to join the company full time in 2008. His products have garnered five TEC Awards, five MIPA Awards, and numerous other awards. As Tudor put it, “I enjoy developing disruptive products” — that is, innovative products that can potentially shake up and energize the market.
As Chief Technology Officer, Tudor oversaw all PreSonus advanced development activities and evaluated and implemented emerging technologies that have been utilized in many of the companies most successful products. Along with PreSonus CSO Jim Odom, he developed the strategic direction of the company’s innovative products and technologies.”
“Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of working with Bob, or even interacting with him at events or trade shows, was likely touched by his energy, enthusiasm, and passion for technology—and specifically, technology that allowed people to make better music. He was always fascinated with what could be done and was never really deterred by challenges or technical hurdles. He not only made things that no one else could see or do possible, he made them look easy. We have not only lost a truly amazing engineer but a very dear friend to so many people in this industry.”- Jim Mack, CEO PreSonus
