Sear died on April 29 in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side. The cause was complications of a subdural hematoma, or bleeding from the brain, after he injured himself in a fall, said his daughter Julia.
At various times Mr. Sear was a professional tuba player; a designer, importer and dealer of specialty tubas; a composer of film soundtracks; and an electronic music enthusiast who advised Robert Moog on the design of his Moog synthesizer, the instrument that revolutionized popular music beginning in the 1960s.
But to more recent generations of musicians, Mr. Sear was best known as the owner of Sear Sound, a studio on West 48th Street in Manhattan that, guided by Mr. Sears intransigent ear, has for decades resisted the conversion to digital recording equipment.
The studio is renowned for its lovingly maintained gear, including a console built by Mr. Sear and an extensive collection of microphones powered with vacuum tubes the glowing glass bulbs that contribute to the often-cited warm sound of analog audio instead of solid-state transistors.
Among the musicians who have recorded at Sear are Ms. Jones, Mr. Marsalis, Steely Dan, Wilco, Lou Reed, Joanna Newsom and Bjork. Bono and the Edge of U2 were recently there working on music for their long-delayed Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, according to the studio manager, Roberta Findlay.
Analog equipment, like cassette tape decks, records and reproduces sound as continuous wave forms. Digital equipment converts audio information into sequences of numbers that approximate those waves, but to analog advocates like Mr. Sear, those digital approximations can sound crude and cold by comparison.
There has been a serious deterioration in the quality of recorded sound since the 1960s, which continues to get worse to this day, Mr. Sear wrote in the late 1990s in a wide-ranging six-part critique of the music industry, What Have They Done to My Art?, which is posted on Sear Sounds Web site, searsound.com.
Walter Sear, an Audio Engineer with a Passion for Analog, Dies
Walter Sear, an audio engineer whose steadfast devotion to pre-digital recording technology led him to maintain a studio with vintage, analog equipment, a risk that paid off in recent years as musicians like Norah Jones, Wilco and Wynton Marsalis flocked there for its rich natural sound.
