The Association of Motion Picture Sound (AMPS) has announced the 2020 winners in its second annual Technical Awards.  We have all the details on all the nominees and the winners.

AMPS Technical Awards 2020 Nominees

There are two technical awards awarded by AMPS each year. They are for Excellence in a Production Audio Product and Excellence in a Post Production Audio Product. This year the nominees were…

Excellence in a Production Audio Product:

• Aaton Hydra radio mic interface

• Lectrosonics D Sqd 4 channel digital radio mic receiver

• Schoeps CMC-1 microphone pre-amplifier

• Sound Devices Scorpio mixer, recorder

• Zaxcom Nova integrated mixer, recorder & radio mic receivers

• Zoom F6 mixer, recorder

Excellence in a Post Production Audio Product:

• Dear Reality dearVR Spatial Connect

• Harpex Plugin

• iZotope Dialogue Match

• Marc Specter’s Kraken Dialogue Editor’s Toolkit

• Sound Particles 2.0

• Synchro Arts Revoice Pro 4.2

The Winners

The Winner of the 2020 AMPS Technical Award for Excellence in a Production Audio Product is Scorpio mixer, recorder from Sound Devices.

Paul Isaacs, Director of Product Management and Design at Sound Devices added…

“We are honoured to receive the AMPS Award for Excellence in a Production Audio Product. We thank AMPS members for their support and congratulate all nominees and winners.    Scorpio was developed to address the demands of the most complex production sound applications. We continue to evolve the product to meet the needs of sound professionals and thank Sound Devices customers for their continuing feedback and insights.”

The Winner of the 2020 AMPS Technical Award for Excellence in a Post Production Audio Product is Dialogue Match fro iZotope.

Melissa Misicka, Senior Director of Brand Marketing for iZotope told us…

"It always means so much to us when our products are celebrated by an organization that promotes the value of great sound. We're grateful to the members of AMPS for supporting Dialogue Match, and we're proud to help audio post engineers deliver seamless, cohesive dialogue in seconds rather than hours."

Production sound mixer, John Rodda, who led the awards group concluded…

“It’s an honour to lead the team on our technical awards.   This year we’re awarding certificates to winning products in both production and post-production.   Our members nominated a fantastic field of nominees and we’d all like to congratulate the winners, Sound Devices and iZotope for their technical excellence and innovation.”

What Is The History Of The AMPS Awards?

AMPS is a craft guild made up of over 550 of the most imaginative and highly experienced sound talents working in the film, television and games industries.  Its members have received a host of international accolades including BAFTA, Oscar, Emmy and MPSE awards.  

The AMPS Annual Awards were inaugurated as part of their 25th Anniversary celebrations back in 2014.  It started with the AMPS Award for Excellence in Sound for a Feature Film.  From the films that were exhibited in 2013, a large committee of sound professionals chose five titles to nominate and then the whole of the AMPS Voting Membership was then balloted to determine the winner.

In 2015, they added the AMPS Award for Excellence in Sound for a Television Drama to provide an opportunity for the AMPS membership to vote for what they deemed to be the best television drama soundtrack. At the time, it was decided that the quality of the dialogue track was crucial to a worthy soundtrack, so they also honoured the Supervising Dialogue/ADR Editor. This was then expanded in the 6th Annual Awards to include the recognition of the Key 1st Assistant Sound (boom operator) in the Film Sound and Television Drama Sound categories.

In the same year, two more Awards were added: Excellence in Sound for a Factual Film and a Technical Award for Excellence in a Hardware or Software Audio Product. The latter has since been split to recognise product innovation for both Production and Post Production Audio 

The creation of awards for sound was an agenda item at AMPS first Council meeting in 1989, 25 years later we realised that aim, and the AMPS Awards, now in their 7th year, are gaining recognition and prestige throughout the industry. Every year we endeavour to release and publicise our results ahead of the major Awards programs, in the hope that the decisions reached by AMPS Sound Professionals might influence voters in the Sound categories of other annual awards. 

The winners each receive the prestigious polished bronze AMPS trophy.  Other crew members who have creatively contributed to the winning soundtracks receive Certificates of Merit. Wins and Nominations are included in IMDb Awards entries.

AMPS is profoundly grateful to Dolby Laboratories, Sennheiser and  Twickenham Studios for their generous sponsorship of our Awards.