The Sound Guy, Inc., a privately held corporation based in Silicon Valley, California, is the manufacturer of SFX Machine RT, SFX Machine Pro, SFX Machine Pro for RTAS, Backwards Machine, and Spectral Machine. 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 California, France, 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.
Other products include ChatterBlocker, a program that masks unwanted conversations so you can focus on your work, not your coworkers; Treadmill Meditation, an audio recording that helps you meditate while exercising; and It's a Jungle in There: Sounds of the Tropical Rainforest in 3D.
Earl Vickers, founder and CEO of The Sound Guy, Inc., is an audio engineer, programmer, songwriter and product developer. He holds five granted patents and has four 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, Creative Labs Advanced Technology Center, and ST Semiconductor. His short stories have been published in three languages and released as audio recordings.
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 has presented several signal processing papers at AES including a comprehensive article on the loudness war.
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)
Spectral Machine: Programmed by Xavier Amatraian, Alessandro Saccoia & others.
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.