As a precocious teenager in the 1960s, Robert B. Ingebretsen built robots and primitive computers that could talk. As a University of Utah graduate student, Ingebretsen restored scratchy old recordings by opera great Enrico Caruso by transferring musical sounds into computer codes and back again. But it was his pioneering work in digital sound for which Ingebretsen, who was 54 when he died of heart failure Sunday at his Salt Lake City home, received an Academy Award in 1999. Ingebretsen and his mentor, former University of Utah professor Thomas Stockham, invented technology that translated analog sound into a digital format -- a discovery that eventually led to the development of compact discs. "He was a genius in every sense of the word," said younger brother Richard Ingebretsen. "When I was a kid we were always going to award ceremonies for my brother." A graduate computer science student at the U. in the early 1970s, Ingebretsen studied under Stockham, an expert in sound enhancement hired in 1973 to scrutinize President Nixon's secret White House tapes. After graduation in 1975, Ingebretsen joined Stockham at Soundstream Inc., a Utah company where Ingebretsen wrote the software for the first practical digital audio editing system. Soundstream later branched into film and briefly operated an editing studio at a Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles, directly upstairs from the "Mork and Mindy" set. Ingebretsen commuted from Utah to Los Angeles, where he supervised the new digital recording for the 1982 re-release of Disney's "Fantasia." He and Stockham also made what is believed to be the first digital film, a 20-second portrait of a human hand. But Soundstream lost out to consumer electronics giants Sony and Philips in the race to produce CDs and players. Ingebretsen, Stockham and hardware engineer Bruce Rothaar never patented the digital audio editing technology they created, costing them untold millions. Ingebretsen "had the patent papers on his desk but never filmed them," his brother said. Ingebretsen spent the next 15 years in near anonymity in Salt Lake City, founding a series of small high-tech companies. Then in 1998, he received a letter from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences informing him that he and Stockham had won Scientific and Engineering awards for their work. The next year Ingebretsen, in a rented tux, accepted the gold-plated award -- a cousin of the better-known Oscar statuette -- during a ceremony at a Beverly Hills, Calif., hotel. Ingebretsen also helped pioneer satellite communications technology. In recent years, he worked for a Centerville-based startup that develops software for hand-held computers. But the mild-mannered father of five will always be best known for his achievements almost 30 years ago. Services will be today at 2 p.m. at the LDS Ensign Fourth Ward, Ninth Avenue and K Street in Salt Lake City.

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