Leapwing Audio co-founder and director of R&D Jeroen Dreessen (pictured centre) catches up with Headliner to reflect on the importance of his day-to-day role, the company’s aims as a provider of professional plugin solutions, and its short yet compelling history.
Could you start by telling us about your background in audio?
I went to college to do electrical engineering, with a specialty in chip design. When the time came to do my dissertation, or thesis, I found out there was an internship going at Philips here in Belgium, in their sound and acoustics group. I did that for half a year, and from an engineering perspective got the chance to dive into some very cool and interesting topics like psychoacoustics.
In 2009 I was struggling to find work, so I went into teaching for a little while. Then I got a phone call from a former colleague at Philips, and I ended up working there for another year as a sound and acoustics engineer. Then another former colleague from Philips left for a startup called Auro Technologies, which was developing codec technology for 3D audio. I started working there doing a bit of everything; from algorithm design and prototyping to doing demos and pre-sales.
I learned a lot there for about seven years, and it was also there where I met Robin Reumers, because that startup was located in the Galaxy Studios building here in Belgium. So then as a research engineer I got to actually work in a music studio alongside mixing and post production engineers.