As it happens every year, the Recording Academy has announced the honorees for its 2021 Special Merit Awards. The Lifetime Achievement Award honorees are Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Lionel Hampton, Marilyn Horne, Salt-N-Pepa, Selena, and Talking Heads. Ed Cherney, Benny Golson and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds are Trustees Award honorees; Daniel Weiss is the Technical Grammy Award recipient.
The honorees will be recognized on the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards which will be broadcast Sunday, March 14, 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
"As we welcome the new class of Special Merit Award honorees, it gives us a chance to reward and recognize the influence they've had in the music community regardless of genre," Harvey Mason jr., Interim President/CEO of the Recording Academy, says. "As a music creator and music lover, I am grateful that we are able to look back at our influences and see the impact that they have made on our community. In a year where music has helped keep us together, I look forward to honoring this iconic group of music creators."
The recipient of this year's Technical Grammy Award was awarded by the Recording Academy for its contributions to the evolution of digital audio. Daniel Weiss is one of the true pioneers of digital technology as the founder of Weiss Engineering, in Zurich, Switzerland. "The company has designed and manufactured groundbreaking digital audio equipment for mastering studios, including the IBIS digital mixing console and the ultra-high-quality Gambit Series digital products," the Academy states.
Following an earlier career as an electronics engineer since 1979, working for Studer Revox in Zurich where he worked on the design of a sampling frequency converter and the digital signal processing electronics for Studer DASH digital audio recorders, Daniel Weiss moved on to found his own business, motivated by the launch of the Compact Disc.
With Weiss Engineering he focused on the design and manufacture of digital audio equipment for recording and mastering, where he developed the modular 102 Series system, a 24-bit/96kHz conversion solution sold worldwide via the Harmonia Mundi Acustica Company in Germany. One of the largest setups of a 102 Series system was used at Sony Music in New York in the form of the IBIS digital mixing console. Sony used it to mix classical music recordings.
In the early nineties the Weiss Gambit Series was launched with separate rack units for equalization dynamics processing, de-noiser/de-clicker, A/D converter, D/A converter, sampling frequency converter, etc., all using 40 bit floating point processors and sampling rates of up to 96kHz. The acceptance of these systems in the mastering community led to the appearance of a community of high-end audio enthusiasts, inspiring Daniel Weiss to launch also the Weis hifi range of products, which he continues to expand today with a range of premium DAC and network players.
For more about Daniel Weiss, read this audioXpress interview from 2013.
The Recording Academy Technical Grammy Award recipients are voted on by the Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing Advisory Council and Chapter Committees, and are ratified by the Academy's Trustees. The award is presented to individuals and companies who have made contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording industry.
Last year's recipient was George Augspurger (2020), and previous recipients included Ray Dolby (1995), Rupert Neve (1997), George Massenburg (1998), Bill Putnam (2000), Les Paul (2001), Geoff Emerick (2003), Roger Linn (2011), Roger Nichols (2012), Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (2015), and Alan Dower Blumlein (2017), among many others.
www.grammy.com
