Leadership

Jim Starzynski, Chairman
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Chairman

Jim Starzynski is Director and Principal Audio Engineer for NBC Universal Advanced Engineering, working on HDTV and overseeing audio technologies and practices for all NBC Universal broadcast and cable properties. He is responsible for establishing NBC’s audio strategy for DTV.

Jim is chairperson of Advanced Television Systems Committee’s technical subgroup S34-2 on Next Generation Audio Systems and S6-3 on digital television loudness. He is on the board of directors for the home audio division of the Consumer Electronics Association and a member of SMPTE and AES. Jim gave expert testimony to Congress on the Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation Act, holds four Emmy Awards for technical achievement for multiple Olympic broadcasts and is the 2011 recipient of the ATSC’s highest technical honor, the Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor Award.
Tom Sahara, Chairman Emeritus
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Chairman Emeritus

Tom Sahara is Vice President of Operations and Technology for Turner Sports. A 30-year veteran of the broadcast industry, Sahara has been with Turner Broadcasting since 1997 overseeing the remote broadcast facilities for all Turner Sports productions, which includes the day to day operations of the live sports productions seen on TBS and TNT as well as supporting the infrastructure for the Turner Sports online properties. During his time with the company, Turner Sports has evolved into a market leader in multi-platform sports production, producing the Emmy® award-winning TrackPass application on NASCAR.com and the Emmy® nominated PGA Pipeline on PGA.com. Mr. Sahara is based in Atlanta.

Prior to his current role, Mr. Sahara served as the director of technical operations for the Goodwill Games, where he supervised all technical functional areas, studio and remote production facilities and crews, vendors, technology providers, transmission and communications, as well as budget oversight for operations. He also previously served as the manager of studio engineering for Turner Studios where he managed the technical operations for all live studio productions.

Prior to joining Turner Sports, Mr. Sahara was a freelance technical manager for various major television networks covering the NFL, NBA and the NCAA, as well as the 1996, 2000 and 2002 Olympic Games where he directed the technical operations for Olympic sporting events.
Roger Charlesworth, Executive Director
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Executive Director

Roger Charlesworth is an independent consultant on media technology and an industry expert on multi-channel audio production for television. Roger’s primary focus concerns the integration of mainstream information technology in electronic media applications and the challenges of change management in re-engineering production workflow to exploit new technology.

A former recording engineer, Roger’s extensive audio background includes serving as Executive Vice President of Solid State Logic Inc before moving on to advise major facilities providers such as the Hit Factory Group on technology issues. Roger’s writings for audio industry publications include a technology column for Pro Sound News and a role as a founding contributor to Surround Professional. His interest in live music production for entertainment television has led to work with the David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Fallon shows as well as consult on numerous and musical specials with artists including the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, and Sting.

Roger enjoys a long association with Saturday Night Live where he managed the production’s transition to HD and 5.1 audio and coordinated with NBC on the massive re-build of historic Studio 8H and the build-out of surrounding HD infrastructure. Roger was extensively involved in SNL’s transition to a tapeless, file-based workflow. This project involved the creation of a 30 year archive of SNL shows stored online, at full resolution along with a disk-based networking and distribution system for SNL’s multi-camera HD video and audio production. More recently Roger helped design the production workflows and guide the rebuild of NBC’s Studio 6B for SNL’s sister production, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

As an industry advocate for standardizing DTV audio production formats, Roger is currently working with several news and informational content creators to design real-time and quick-turn audio workflows for native 5.1 DTV audio production.

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