OBEDIA was actually born out of frustration and a set of chance meetings. Steve Garth, then President and CEO of Steinberg North America, was becoming extremely frustrated at his inability to deliver the kind of service and support his customers expected and quite rightly deserved.

“Technology changes so quickly, and software developers bring out products so rapidly, that customers face a huge challenge. First, they have to figure out how the products work on their own and then plug them into each other and figure out how they work together. Then they have to figure out how to keep them working until the project is finished. It can be overwhelming for creative people to deal with this many technical issues. So if a problem occurred they called Steinberg” says Garth.

“A lot of times I had customers waiting forever on the phone to talk to one of my technicians, only to discover that the problem was a sound card, and they were then referred to the sound card manufacturer. The customer was upset because his problem wasn’t solved, my technician was upset because he couldn’t help the customer, and I was doubly upset because both my tech person and my customer were upset.”

“This is not an unusual situation either. It’s a daily challenge faced by all software developers and one that has no easy solution. It doesn’t make good business sense to invest in training your technicians to support your competitor’s products, but it makes even less business sense to have unhappy customers and employees.”
“When the technology works - it works so well. It is an empowering, inspiring experience that has created whole new genres of music. It has also introduced a whole new generation of kids to the art of making music without them having to spend ten years learning an instrument.

But in the end, artists are artists. Most are not technicians and should not be expected to be. They need one place for technical advice, support and assistance on every aspect of their system and they need it 24/7. The only solution in my mind was to set up a company specifically dedicated to that task.”

This came up in conversation over a beer with Fred Maher, engineer / programmer / producer who has worked on many Grammy Award winning records. “I knew exactly what Steve was talking about because I had experienced it myself” said Maher. “I was working on this high pressure project as a programmer/ editor and we could not get the digital console to talk to the DAW. The console manufacturer couldn’t help and the DAW supplier couldn’t help so a guy from the DAW company had to come down and spend a few days figuring out a way to transfer the files. It eventually got accomplished, but from that day on, I vowed I would never get myself into that situation again.

“I bought myself a DAW and started beating it up. I was spending a lot of time in studios and used it under a lot of very extreme circumstances. Eventually I knew that thing inside out and exactly what it could and couldn’t do. In the process I got a reputation among the major league producers as someone that could make DAWs sing and make sure they kept singing thru to the end of a project. My phone started ringing off the hook and I decided at that point that what was really needed was a company dedicated to providing these services 24/7. Steve and I had a similar idea, but came at it from different direction. That’s when I met Jayce Murphy.”

Jayce was Operations Manager of DMT at the time, a hi end rental & services company in Burbank that supplied Nuendo and Pro Tools rigs for major motion picture scoring, records & post houses. “Our clients were extremely demanding and were working on high profile projects with really tight deadlines.” Said Murphy, “It gave me experience with really pushing the technology and learning its limitations.

I also noticed that while technology increasingly worked its way from the major recording studios into project & private studios, the technical support necessary to maintain and integrate it did not. This to me seemed like a significant downside to the great strides in technology and created an obvious gap in productivity. Since I work quite a bit on various benchmarking and edge bleeding testing, I am often looked to in the industry for solutions when the manufacture themselves fall short. Having commiserated on many occasions with Fred on his similar efforts, the thought kept occurring: why isn’t someone doing something about this?

So Steve, Fred and Jayce formed a company whose mission is simple. To provide superior technical services and assistance, around the clock, wherever the location, to the digital media artist community, based on the following principles:

• OBEDIA is a one-stop shop for a complete range of technical services that support all the major Digital Audio Workstations.
• We consult with clients to ensure they purchase the best system to suit their needs.
• We integrate systems to make sure they work flawlessly.
• We provide technical support to fix any glitches in operation.
• We train users on how to get the most out of their systems
• We offer preventive maintenance contracts and regular checkups to make sure that everything is updated, inventoried, archived and running correctly, greatly decreasing the chance of a major problem occurring in the future.
• We offer these services 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and are ready the moment our clients need us.
• We recruit only the very best technical people, all of whom are experts and well accomplished in their field. In the rare case that one of our specialists encounters a problem outside their field of expertise, then he or she can call on our extensive network to bring in exactly the specialist required.
• We guarantee 100% customer satisfaction. Whatever it takes, we bring our powerful resources and knowledge to bear on the situation so our client’s problems always get fixed. This ensures the impressive technology today’s artists have at their disposal empowers, rather than hinders, the creative process.