The NAMM TEC Awards’ TECnology Hall of Fame has announced five defining audio products and innovations to be honored as the newest inductees to the prestigious TECnology Hall of Fame. The 2025 awards will be presented at a ceremony held at 5:00 pm on January 25, 2025, during the NAMM Show in the NAMM Member Center at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim. All NAMM attendees are invited and there is no charge for the event.
Founded 21 years ago by noted audio/music journalist (and FRONT of HOUSE magazine editor) George Petersen as a historic adjunct to the annual TEC (Technical Excellence and Creativity) Awards, and presented since 2015 by the NAMM Museum of Making Music, the TECnology Hall of Fame honors products and innovations that have made significant contributions to the advancement of audio and music technology.
Inductees are selected by a select panel of top producers, engineers, inventors, educators, authors and journalists in the field of music and audio production, and products must be at least 10 years old to be considered. Joining the 185 previous honorees in the TECnology Hall of Fame, are five inductees for 2025.
These include the Western Electric Model 47a (1928), one of the first commercial condenser microphones, which found favor in the growing industry for “talkie” movies and among other films, was employed for the 1931 production of the horror classic Frankenstein.
Countryman Associates’ Type 85 FET Direct Box — which debuted in 1978 — is still in production 46 years later. Carl Countryman’s wide-bandwidth, ultra-low distortion design in its compact, nearly indestructible housing has garnered tens of thousands of users worldwide.
E-mu Systems laid down the gauntlet for affordable, high-performance sampling instruments in 1981 with its Emulator I, but with the arrival of MIDI, the company’s follow-up Emulator II in 1984 — boasting longer sampling times, powerful sound design filters and a huge library of sounds — took off like a rocket and became a standard both in live performance and studio production.
Solid State Logic made history in 1977 with its Model 4000 — the first computerized mixing console — which defined the modern studio mixer and set the stage for the large analog consoles. But 1995’s SL 9000 J Series mixer— with up to 120-channel frames, 48-track routing, E and G Series EQ and much improved audio circuitry — opened the floodgates and even today — 20 years later, with hundreds of hit records under its belt — is one of the company’s most sought–after models.
Meyer Sound Labs rocked the live performance world with Constellation in 2006. The system combines ambient sensing microphones, sophisticated DSP and world-class loudspeakers to modify the reverberant characteristics of a space. For the first time, this revolutionary electroacoustic architecture package let venues instantly alter their acoustics to accommodate a variety of events and source material and is scalable to work in classrooms, boardrooms, houses of worship and restaurants as well as performing arts centers and music venues.
“Each of these innovations made a major contribution to how sound is created and reproduced – even years after their debut,” says TECnology Hall of Fame Director George Petersen.
