Episode 451 – European Radio Royalties, Assistant Engineers, And Minuendo CPO Tom Trones

My guest this week is Tom Trones, co-founder and chief product officer for Minuendo lossless earplugs. Minuendo earplugs can be manually adjusted from 7 to 25dB with no loss in sound quality. Besides being a musician and audio engineer, Tom has worked for a number of companies as an acoustics engineer. After working as a mixer at a number of festivals, he discovered the need for earplugs as he was asked to raise the level ever louder. Learning about the limitations of hearing protection that was on the market led to the development of an earplug that keeps the natural flat frequency response while the attenuation is easily adjustable. During the interview we spoke about playing an 8 string guitar, the difference between music and industrial earplugs, the different government standards for hearing protection, how your ear canal changes over time, and much more. I spoke with Tom from his home in Oslo via zoom. On the intro I’ll take a look at the reason why European radio royalty payments are not being paid, and how the job of assistant engineer is way different today.