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Thanks to Andrew, who pointed this out in comments, but I wanted to bring it out here:

Thomas G. Stockham Jr., a pioneer researcher of digital-sound recording who won a technical Oscar and helped investigate President Nixon's mysterious 18-minute tape gap, has died from complications related to Alzheimer's disease.

The 70-year-old former University of Utah professor died Tuesday in Salt Lake City.

Stockham, an electrical engineer, and the late Robert B. Ingebretsen, who had been his graduate student, did pioneering work in the 1970s on converting analog sound into a digital format. Their work helped lead to the development of compact discs, and they received a Scientific/Engineering Academy Award in 1999.

In 1972, Stockham was one of the experts hired to try to examine the 18-minute gap on one of Nixon's secret White House tapes.