Monday, December 01, 2008

Requiescat in pace - H Sridhar

The demise of H Sridhar has come as a rude shock to all fans of Indian music, South Indian in particular. Winner of 4 national awards for Mahanadhi, Dil Se, Lagaan & Kannathil Muththamittal, H Sridhar was one of those rare breed of sound engineers who were trained in music too. Born on 31st Mar 1960, HS was just 48 yrs old when his end came. I read on the internet that he returned back home at 2 AM after working on the soundtrack of 'Ghajini' and didn't wake up from his sleep. The doctors declared him dead around 1000 AM and the reason was attributed as a cardiac arrest.

South Indians in particular are known to look out for names of technicians and the name of H Sridhar as Sound Designer / Sound Engineer / DTS mix was a sure fire indication of top notch sound mix on multichannel soundtracks. Media Artists, an organisation which pioneered the use of DTS as movie soundtrack formats, was H Sridhar's main umbrella. H Sridhar has also mixed / engineered almost all of AR Rahman's soundtracks. It's simply no surprise that out of the 4 national awards he has won, the music for 3 were scored by AR Rahman.

We have all the technology one would need to create a near perfect sound for CD / DVD, HS belonged to an era that had to work hard at achieving that. It's probably from there that the sense of achieving higher things would have imbibed into his system, every movie mixed by him had his stamp on it. His presence will surely be missed by the industry, DTS technologies owes it's success in India majorly to Real Image and H Sridhar who worked to create some of the best software in DTS in our times.

# All pics used in this post are from KJ Singh's collection and permission is awaited for using this here. Content will be removed if objection is raised by the owner.