Lawo is an international company based in

Rastatt Rastatt () is a town with a Baroque core, District of Rastatt, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is located in the Upper Rhine Plain on the Murg river, above its junction with the Rhine and has a population of around 50,000 (2011). Rastatt was an ...

, Germany, specializing in the manufacture of

digital mixing console In professional audio, a digital mixing console (DMC) is a type of mixing console used to combine, route, and change the dynamics, equalization and other properties of multiple audio input signals, using digital signal processing rather than an ...

s and other professional audio equipment. It was founded in 1970 by Peter Lawo, and is currently run by his son Philipp. The company is notable for supplying the audio mixing equipment for the

2012 London Olympics The 2012 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXX Olympiad and also known as London 2012) was an international multi-sport event held from 27 July to 12 August 2012 in London, England, United Kingdom. The first event, the ...

and

Nine Network The Nine Network (stylised 9Network, commonly known as Channel Nine or simply Nine) is an Australian commercial free-to-air television network. It is owned by parent company Nine Entertainment and is one of five main free-to-air television netw ...

, and for sports events in Asia, North America and Australia. The first developments of Peter Lawo were driven by the needs of composers of

electronic music Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means ( electroac ...

Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...

. To Stockhausen's specifications Peter Lawo built an apparatus called "module 69 B" which was used to perform Stockhausen's composition ''

Mantra A mantra (Pali: ''manta'') or mantram (मन्त्रम्) is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit, Pali and other languages believed by practitioners to have religious, ma ...

''. The success of this production led to the founding of the Experimentalstudio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of the Südwestfunk in 1971.World New Music Magazine—Contemporary Music in Germany
, International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), 1996, , page 43/44 Together with the first director of this studio,

Hans Peter Haller Hans Peter Haller (26 October 1929 – 16 April 2006) was a German composer and pioneer of electroacoustic music. Life Born in Radolfzell, Haller studied church music in Heidelberg from 1947 and took composition lessons with Wolfgang Fortne ...

, Peter Lawo developed the Halaphon. (The name resulted from the names of the developers: HA(ller)-LA(wo)-PHON). This machine became famous when being used in all the later works of composer

Luigi Nono Luigi Nono (; 29 January 1924 – 8 May 1990) was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music. Biography Early years Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono beg ...

Studio für Elektronische Musik, Lawo PTR, WDR, Cologne

Later, Peter Lawo developed mixing consoles for Stockhausen, whose composition ''Oktophonie'' was produced in the Studio for Electronic Music of the German Public Broadcaster WDR (

Westdeutscher Rundfunk Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (''West German Broadcasting Cologne''; WDR, ) is a German public-broadcasting institution based in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia with its main office in Cologne. WDR is a constituent member of the conso ...

). For the production of this composition, the automatic recall of very fast fader movements was used—which was made possible by Lawo's hybrid mixing console PTR ("Programmierbare Ton Regie" = programmable audio control).

History

1970 – founded by Peter Lawo as engineer's office for electronic equipment *1970s – Development of electronic sound processors (

Vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''voice'' and ''encoder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder was ...

, Halaphon and alike) and analog mixing consoles *1980s – Development of a programmable audio mixing console called PTR with digital control and analog signal processing *1990s – Development of the digital mc series mixing consoles *2007 – Introduction of DAW plugins for Windows. *2008 – Lawo acquire majority shares in French digital audio company Innovason. *2010 – Introduction of the Sapphire mixing console at the IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam. *2012 – 50 Lawo consoles were used for sound mixing in the

References

External links

* {{official, url=https://www.lawo.com/ Manufacturers of professional audio equipment Music equipment manufacturers Audio equipment manufacturers of Germany Companies based in Baden-Württemberg German brands Audio mixing console manufacturers Video equipment manufacturers