Las Vegas, NV (March 8, 2023)—Hot on the heels of last week’s news that podcast listening has reached record-breaking heights after a startling 2022 post-pandemic drop, the third-annual Ambie Awards were held last night in Las Vegas. The event, presented by The Podcast Academy, honors “excellence in podcasting and elevate awareness and status of podcasts as a unique and personal medium for entertainment, information, storytelling and expression.”
New York’s Defacto Sound’s long-running Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast won the Best Production and Sound Design Award. Meanwhile, Jake Brennan, Matt Beaudoin, Ryan Spraker and Bryce Kanzer of Boston-based Double Elvis Productions took home the Best Original Score and Music Supervision trophy for their work on Disgraceland.
While the vast majority of the 26 award categories focus on genre—Best Comedy Podcast and so on—only a handful focus on actual podcast production, highlighting writing (fiction and nonfiction) and reporting as well as the two audio-related awards for original score/music supervision and production/sound design.
Created by Defacto Sound—a sound design house that has worked with Tesla, HBO, Discovery and many more—Twenty Thousand Hertz is a podcast focused on the histories of modern-day sounds and how we experience them. Hosted by Defacto’s creative director Dallas Taylor, the show looks at everything from the origins of the Netflix “Ta-Dum” and Seinfeld’s signature slap-bass riffs, to more technical topics like the Loudness Wars and how NASA communicates with astronauts.
Interviewed for Pro Sound News in 2020, Taylor explained the show’s ethos, noting, “I wanted to make something that started to bring the joy to sound itself, almost like a chef’s table feel, but for sound, to hopefully get culture more in tune and more conscious about their sense of hearing.”
He added that educating the public about sound and audio benefits every medium, from podcasting to film, as he explained, “If the industry itself—where we only have visuals and sounds—still has a hard time identifying sound as a really creative storytelling tool, then I think the rest of the world probably still has a hard time with this.”
Winning the Ambie for Best Original Score and Music Supervision was Double Elvis Productions’ podcast Disgraceland, a long-running true-crime show that looks at the dramatic, often troubled pasts of musical icons like Led Zeppelin, Sid Vicious, Mac Miller, Chris Brown and others. As the show’s senior producer Matthew Beaudoin told Pro Sound News in 2020, “[We are] very much focused on, ‘How can we get music to support this narrative that we’re telling? How can we get the music to work in concert to support that narrative, and make the experience as immersive as possible?’”
