company-image Company History

Black Diamond Sound Systems (formerly Freeman Sound Labs) got started several years ago when Russ Freeman was mastering one of his new Rippingtons albums for Windham Hill in his state-of-the-art recording studio in Colorado, and remarked to his old man John A. Freeman, an MIT-type neuroscientist heavily into computers who happened to be visiting at the time) how cool it would be to have a really good program for recording and editing audio tracks, adding special effects, and that interfaced to an external tape recorder, synthesizer, and sequencer. Over the next several years, Russ (who won the 1994 MMM Award for Best Engineered CD of the Year, and whose band "The Rippingtons" has been voted the #1 Contempory Jazz Band 5 years running [Jazziz Readers Poll]) provided extensive input into designing a professional-level editing program that contained all of the essential features actually used by professional studio engineers, and that was reliable, inexpensive, and easy to use. What started out as a project to devise new and original algorithms for specific musical applications gradually grew into a product that had widespread appeal to musicians, producers and recording engineers, so it was decided to make it available to the public. Thus began the Freeman Sound Labs. The name was changed to Black Diamond Sound Systems when Freeman and his old man got hooked on skiing, especially at Keystone and Arapaho Basin, which have some spectacular "black diamond" runs.