The Early Days
High Fidelity Review readers will recall that in the early days of the SACD format, regular updates about SACD and DSD were often given in the U.S. market by a representative of Sony Electronics and one from Philips. These representatives were often David Kawakami, the Sony SACD Project Director in the U.S. (based in Sony’s New York offices) and Dr. Andrew Demery from Philips Electronics SACD Project Team in Europe.

Dr. Demery, SACD & the Sonoma Workstation
Over the years, Dr. Demery or “Dem” as he is known in the industry, was the knowledgeable spokesman for Philips at these events. Behind the scenes, Demery worked to coordinate the authoring of SACD discs at Philips in The Netherlands. Later in his tenure working with Super Audio CD and DSD, he switched companies and came to Sony’s SACD Project Team in the U.S. to run the group that provided Sonoma Workstations and DSD equipment to recording studios, engineers and producers.

Today, Dr. Demery continues to manage the Sonoma Workstation rental and provisioning work for the new Super Audio Center, a spin out of the Sony SACD Project Group in the U.S. from the company’s offices in San Francisco. That operation is headed by Gus Skinas who is based in Boulder, Colorado.

The Demery Chronicles, No. 1
In the first installment of the series, Dr. Demery talks about his work in car electronics and mobile radio at Philips and how that work led to his joining the SACD Project Group at Philips at the beginning of the SACD format. The article also talks about early work at Philips involving the remixing of Classical Music tapes into Stereo and later Multichannel DSD tapes for evaluation.

All in all, this should be an interesting look at how the SACD format evolved and grew up. I’d suggest dropping by and having a look at these “chronicles” !