Pioneer in digital sound dies

Robert B. Ingebretsen, 54, a pioneer in digital sound who received a technical Academy Award for that work, died Sunday, March 2, 2003, of heart failure in Salt Lake City.

He had worked with his mentor, Dr. Thomas Stockham, on the development of digital sound, which revolutionized the music and movie industries.

The Academy of Motion Picture Sciences and Art honored him with the technical Academy Award in 1999 for his accomplishments in waveform editing, crossfades and cut-and-paste techniques for digital audio editing,

Stockham is acclaimed as the father of digital sound, but Mr. Ingebretsen made important contributions to digital audio editing. He had also worked with Stockham in the Soundstream company and had helped pioneer satellite communications technology, too. He had also supervised the digital recording in the re-release of Disney's "Fantasia" in 1982.

However, he and Stockham never patented their digital sound technology and thus lost out to the big electronics companies.

Mr. Ingebretsen had also been one of the top students at the University of Utah computer sciences department after Stockham founded it in the early 1970s. He was a graduate of the U., with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics and computer science.

Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served a full-time mission to the Northern States and had many other church callings.

Funeral services were held Friday, March 7.