SOUND+IMAGE: Let's start at the beginning. How does someone end up in the business of audio codecs and technologies? Were you a computer kid, or a music kid, or both?
JONNY McCLINTOCK: My path to aptX was via Dolby, which I joined out of college. In no way am I musical, nor particularly technical. Like many of my peers, I left Ireland and moved to London where I joined Dolby in 1987 and worked on their cinema products, notably Spectral Recording [the Dolby SR noise reduction format developed by Dolby for pro audio since 1986 and in cinema audio since the late 1980s].
Then I went travelling — to Australia! I worked for Ericsson there on early analogue cellular base stations until 1993, when I made the decision to move back home. I was able to get a job in customer support with what was then APT Limited, aand was able to move up the ranks into a commercial role until I became part of a team which effected a management buyout in 2004. In truth the world of commerce fascinated me, and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time with an emerging technology.
S+I: Tell us the early story of aptX. Wikipedia says it was developed in the 1980s by Dr. Stephen Smyth as part of his Ph.D. research at Queen's University Belfast. What happened next?
Yes — Stephen, his brother Mike and friend Paul Smith set up APT Limited with funding from both QUBIS [Queen's University Belfast seed funding for start-ups] and Solid State Logic. They raised enough to launch the APTX100ED chip based on a masked DSP from AT&T. That was sold to OEMs that were servicing the needs of radio broadcasters. They then started to build sound cards for OEMs, and end
