Lexicon Celebrates 30 Years of Digital Audio

Delta T-101, the first Lexicon product.

Thirty years ago, Lexicon released its first product, the Delta T-101 delay line. This was the first commercially-available professional digital audio product, so it may be fair to call this the anniversary of the introduction of digital audio itself.

MIT Professor Dr Francis Lee had developed a digital delay unit for heartbeat monitoring. With engineer Chuck Bagnashi, he founded the company American Data Sciences in 1969, with offices over the Lexington Savings Bank in Lexington, MA. The company changed its name to Lexicon in 1971, when it appeared that there would be a future in digital technology for language instruction.

Barry Blesser, then a teaching assistant to Dr. Lee at MIT, suggested putting audio through the system. The result was a 100 millisecond audio delay line – not so impressive today, but at the time it was more than state of the art.

This interested the late Steve Temmer at Gotham Audio in New York, who commissioned 50 units from the Lexicon team, to be used to overcome propagation delays in live sound installations and as a pre-delay for echo-plates.

Thus in 1971 the Delta T-101 was born, with “Gotham Audio” on the front nameplate and “Lexicon” on the back. The original unit offered a response up to 10 kHz and 60 dB S/N, which Lexicon felt was capable of improvement. The Delta T-102, sold under the Lexicon name, pushed the noise down to –90 dB and helped to persuade the industry that digital audio was a viable proposition.

1972 saw the introduction of a Lexicon product for the language instruction market – the Varispeech, the first digital time-compression system. Its successor, the broadcast-quality Model 1200, went on to win an Emmy in 1984.

Ron Noonan joined the company in 1973 as CEO (a position he held until 1996). He realized that the company needed to diversify, and targeted the professional audio market.

The breakthrough was the development of the 224, one of the first commercially viable digital reverb systems, shown at the AES Convention in 1978 and shipped the following year. Designed by David Griesinger, a Ph.D. physicist from Harvard who is still with the company, the 224 remained an industry standard until the introduction, in 1986, of its successor, the 480L.

The company went public in the UK (which had always been a strong market for Lexicon) in 1985, and raised the funds needed for the development of the Opus digital audio workstation, which was released in 1988. In the same year, the company introduced the first all-digital surround-sound processor for the home theater market, the CP-1. Lexicon has been a leader in the high-end home theater since. The company went on to release several signal processors, including the PCM80, PCM90, PCM81, PCM91, MPX100, MPX500, and most recently the MPX200.

Under the direction of current Lexicon President Wayne Morris, the company debuted the 960L Multi-Channel Digital Effects System, which replaced the 480L as its current flagship product. With its 24-bit/96kHz processing capability and true multi-channel surround reverb processing, the Lexicon 960L brings a new level of aural enhancement to surround music mixing, one that was not possible before. Utilizing Lexicon’s revolutionary 3DPM.

Three-Dimensional Perceptual Modeling algorithms and the 960L’s extensive array of factory programs, users can achieve sonic results that only Lexicon signal processors can deliver and do so in a discrete 6-channel environment.

Combined with such operational multi-channel features as 8 touch-sensitive motorized faders and an assignable joystick for surround panning and creative parameter control, the Lexicon 960L makes true multi-channel surround signal processing a reality. The 960L has been embraced by leading recording engineers, producers, artists and world-class studios.