About René Jaeger

René began his audio career in the 60s at Karg Laboratories, famous for its vacuum tube, crystal-controlled FM tuner.

Development work on a high performance PLL synthesized tuner brought him to a job at Adams-Russell (M/A-COM), where he learned much about the techniques of low noise, broadband RF devices catering to the Military’s cold war activities.

A chance meeting with David Blackmer began a nine year romp at dbx, designing audio compressors and noise reduction systems. Among the fun projects were low noise bipolar and FET preamp designs for moving coil pickups, which led to the design of a FET preamp for Charles Fischer (Cambridge Records), which was used in one of his ribbon microphones.

Next up was another nine year term at Lexicon where René was responsible for A/D and D/A converter development as well as leading the company into gate array technology with the PCM60, a low cost digital reverb. The culmination of his stay involved contributing to the famous 480L reverb, whose controller was seen on so many music studio desks in the 90s, as well as their first surround sound processor, the CP-1.

Then came three years with New England Digital, working on converter improvements for the Synclavier and Direct-to-Disk recording systems, followed by a move to California and the Grass Valley Group where René was responsible for managing and designing large (1024x1024) analog and digital routers for the broadcast industry. His culminating design was for a 1.485Gbit digital video router for HDTV, to which he contributed his knowledge of RF stripline techniques.

René then went to Mackie Designs (currently Loud Audio), designing first the Onyx 1220 and then the 8-Bus and 4-Bus sound reinforcement mixers. In 2005 he began research on the development of a 500 watt class D amplifier platform which was used in several of Loud’s powered mixer and loudspeaker systems.

In addition to the above, René has done consulting work for instrumentation, medical and professional audio companies, managed the development of the Pacific Microsonics Model One HDCD mastering converter, and partnered in the founding of Berkeley Audio Design.