This year's Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, will see Sound On Sound announce the winners of the 2012 SOS Awards. Now in their second year, the SOS Awards honour products that have been available in the last year, and that have made our lives in the studio all the more enjoyable. What's more, with the exception of the Editors Choice award, they're all voted for by you, our readers! And this year, to reflect the growing convergence between music recording and performance technology, we've added a new Live Sound category.
We received a tremendous number of votes — a massive increase on last year's inaugural SOS Awards — and we're now delighted to be able to announce the winners! The award for Best Audio Interface went to Apogee, for their high-end, modular Symphony I/O interface. The DAW Software award was won by Avid's Pro Tools, while the award for Effects & Processing Hardware went to the Lexicon PCM96. Lexicon also won the Plug-in Effects category, with their PCM Native Reverb, while the Plug-in Processing award went to Celemony's Melodyne. The award for Best Hardware Controller was won by SSL, for their Nucleus control surface, while Moog's Minimoog Voyager XL won in the Keyboard/Synth category. Neumann's U87ai won the Best Microphone award, and SSL picked up their second SOS Award in the Mixer category, with the Duality console. The Adam A7X speakers won the Monitor award, and the Hardware Recorder award went to Zoom, for the H4N. The Microphone Preamp award went to Focusrite, for the Liquid Channel, while Native Instruments picked up two awards this year: the Software Instrument award went to NI's Kontakt, while their Abbey Road Drums series won the award for Best Sound Library. Sennheiser's HD800s won the award for Best Headphones, and this year's new Live Sound award was won by Allen & Heath, for their GL2400 mixing console.
All of which leaves just the SOS Editor's Choice Award, which is hand-picked by the Sound On Sound editorial team. This prestigious award went, this year, to Sonnox's Fraunhofer Pro-Codec plug-in, a unique piece of software that allows the user to audition a variety of lossy audio codecs in real time, with sophisticated analysis and comparison tools.
We'd like to extend our thanks to you, our readers, for voting in the 2012 SOS Awards, and also congratulate all of this year's winners for all their hard work!
