David Thomas is a multi award winning sound designer with over thirty years experience making drama, documentaries and comedy shows for BBC Radio. He runs Sonic Boom Audio from his garden studio in Lewes, East Sussex.
He has a full Pro Tools Ultimate based post-production studio built to BBC spec with a Mac Pro computer, PMC monitoring and a recording room that can accommodate four actors comfortably. He also regularly uses his quiet garden and house as recording locations to give different acoustics. Most recently the BBCs flagship audio drama “Charles Dexter Ward” and Radio 3’s “Sea Longing” were recorded here.
His outside broadcast rig is based around a Presonus 32 channel fully digital mixing desk with ethernet-based stagebox. He has everything you’d need for a complex radio recording including eight Shure Beta 87a stage mics and six Neumann km184 audience mics, a full multitrack Pro Tools recording system and Qlab sound effect playback system.
He spends a lot of his time recording dramas on location generally recording straight to stereo using a Neumann RSM191 stereo mic and Sound Devices 8 track recorder. he has made more than 50 dramas on location and has been working this way since mobile drama recording became feasible 20 or so years ago. He won BBC Best Sound Designer in 2016 and have been part of the team that won BBC Best Audio Drama three times.