About Us

AUDIO INTERNATIONAL developed as a by-product of the audio engineering career of its founder, Warren C. Slaten.

Warren C. Slaten

As a studio recording engineer, he worked at Robert Swanson Productions, an advertising and “Jingle” studio where the work was developing and recording commercials for radio and television. After five years, he was offered a fifty per cent partnership and expanded the studios, Tempo Sound, with “state of the art” designs, including a second studio and a record mastering facility.

Later Slaten joined Mastertone Studios where he was chief studio engineer working on a wide variety of projects for the record industry and further advancing his knowledge of record mastering. When the owners retired, he purchased the studio business and maintained it for several years.

During the operation of Mastertone, he was approached to design and build recording studios for some of his customers and others that spawned Audio International. Many of the projects took him to Mexico, Columbia, Puerto Rico, Spain, France and West Africa, as well as nearby locations. His specialty was mixing consoles that he designed and built, at home, and then shipped to the final destination.

As the market shifted to mass produced equipment, from Asia, Audio International began designing and servicing commercial/industrial sound systems for schools, churches, temples, office buildings and factories. Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies became the largest client, for nearly twenty years, covering eight different facilities, without any bidding.

Today the company accepts the challenge of bringing affordable presentation technology to houses of worship and others. We design, install and maintain a wide variety of media systems for forward thinking clients.

Recording credits include:

• Bing Crosby              Fleetwood Mac            Mordechai Ben David       Tom Paxton
• Cab Calloway           Otis Spann                    Tito Puente                          Phil Ochs
• Harry Chapin           Buffalo Springfield     Dr. Billy Taylor                   Joe Mensah
• Judy Collins             Lovin’ Spoonful           Charlie Palmieri                  Daniel Santos
• Lionel Hampton      Schlomo Carlbach      Newark Boy’s Chorus         Peter Ustinov
• Olatunji                     Shirley Scott                Silhouettes In Courage       Theodore Bikel

Whitney J. Slaten

Whitney is a live sound engineer, jazz musician and ethnomusicologist. He holds a Bachelor of Music from William Paterson University in the areas of Sound Engineering Arts and Jazz Performance, a Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and is in the process of advancing his studies towards the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University.

As an ethnographer, Whitney studies the nexus of music, sound, technology, and culture through the profession of sound engineering at live music concerts. Live sound engineers mediate the musical sound between musicians on the stage and listeners in the audience. Engineers intend their work to be “transparent,” or undetectable, to the audience during sound reinforcement. However, the inherent vicissitudes within the live sound profession-constantly changing venues, working for different artists, amplifying music for different audiences-greatly challenge engineers’ transparency ideal and force the concept into a dynamic state that social actors regulate through complex negotiation. Whitney describes this negotiation of sonic transparency through a phenomenology of “signal flow”: a confluence of technological and social processes between the material realms of architecture and electronics and the social construction of identity and hegemonic discourse among musicians and sound engineers.

In 2006, Whitney conducted ethnographic fieldwork among live sound engineers at World Music Institute events throughout New York City. The research explored the extent to which the intercultural encounter and negotiation between American sound engineers and musicians from a diverse set of traditional performance practices, and their different conceptions of sound, both drastically shape the technological mediation of musical sound and further make engineers aware of their responsibilities when amplifying less familiar sound sources for a given audience.