The Sound Guy, Inc., a privately held corporation based in Saratoga, California, is the manufacturer of SFX Machine RT, SFX Machine Pro, Backwards Machine, ReSpatializer and ChatterBlocker. The company's software has been bundled with products by BIAS, Cakewalk, Digidesign, E-mu and others. The company also runs AudioEffects.com, a reseller of third-party audio software.
SFX Machine, a popular audio multi-effects plug-in, has won awards including Electronic Musician's Editor's Choice 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.
Earl Vickers, founder and CEO of The Sound Guy, Inc., is an audio engineer, programmer and musician. 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, 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 Yor, and he has presented several signal processing papers at AES including a comprehensive article on the loudness war.
The original (Windows) version of ChatterBlocker was programmed by Vaughan Johnson. Additional coding for the Macintosh OS X version was programmed by Climent Luchianov.
The Sound Guy, Inc., can be contacted at chatter@chatterblocker.com. Customer support and technical support issues should be addressed to support@chatterblocker.com.