Like a lot of us, I started out as a musician. In addition to playing, I began to engineer my own band in the studio. After that I got into live music mixing, then videos, radio commercials, and in the 90's I decided I wanted to do it for television. At the time ProTools was on version 1, and they had a "Pro School" at their office.

The equipment has definitely changed a lot since then.

The industry has changed quite a bit in terms of embracing new tech. The tools we have change all the time, but it's like building a house; regardless of what you use to build it, you're still building a house.

What tools do you use to build?

It depends on the show and what needs to be done.  Coming from a background in my type of television, and after Monster Garage, I learned how to work with audio from hostile environments! I got used to people talking while using power tools and other things of that nature.

With all the shows you've worked on, do you see the same faces, or is it a different team for each gig?

I've worked with some of the same producers since back in the 90s. It seems like a fairly small industry so I end up working with a lot of the same people over and over, especially if they're attached to the shows I'm working on. We get to see each other season after season.

In the sound industry you hear a lot about small communities – do you feel that's a product of the people you choose to keep in your circle, or a product of the work?

The people who stick around are the people who love the work; they don't want to do anything else and don't. It's the people who would do it for free (and we all have) that are still doing it years and years later. It's what they love, and it requires so much of you that if you don't love doing it, you switch careers. We're just as passionate about it today as we were 20 years ago.

They all must be very proud of you for winning an Emmy this year! What went through your mind when you found out about your first Emmy nomination for Deadliest Catch?

I was completely blown away. I got the call from Thom Beers who left the message on my cell phone, and it was kind of broken up: "…like congrats la …" I had to call him back and immediately say "Congratulations for WHAT?" You don't think about someone else listening to your stuff thinking "Wow, that's great! We should nominate them for an award!" It's really humbling and amazing when it happens.

Was this last season bittersweet for you with the death of the captain?

Absolutely. My process is to get emotionally connected to every show that I'm mixing or working with the sound. I work with it until it stirs an emotional sense in me. With the whole arc of Captain Phil's death, and the images that accompanied the story line, I wanted the sound to really help with the story. While on that show I would come off twelve hour days just physically and emotionally drained. If it makes me feel really sad and my eyes are getting all wet, then I figure we're doing a good job. Until the show is done, I experience this stuff over and over again.

What kinds of issues do you run into mixing for The Deadliest Catch?

Deadliest Catch is a unique situation because of not only the safety issues, but there are no sound mixers on the boats. If you figure an icy deck and 30ft seas, you really can't have someone holding a boom over their head. There's also no room on the boats for extra crew; we've got two producers/cameramen on each boat and sometimes they're sleeping in pantries. It's a really small space and gets dangerous pretty quickly. There's one camera mic, the characters are mic'd, the wheelhouse has a Captain Cam, then one mic on deck to catch the general ambience and that's all I get. Depending on the situation, the characters could be in the engine room, near the hydraulics, or have the mic stuck underneath all their protective gear. Let's just say what I get is not terribly pristine.

Catch is one of the few shows where I go through the whole show, every piece of dialogue, evaluate it, and then remove as much noise from it as I can -- and that's where iZotope comes in. I use RX's Denoiser a lot, and Spectral Repair to get rid of isolated booms and bangs. And the Declicker as well.

How did you first learn about iZotope?

From a plug-in forum. Someone had mentioned that Vinyl was available and free. I downloaded it, decided it was a terrific plug-in, and was blown away you were giving it away for free. Right after that, I was looking for something like Spectral Repair, and there were very few out and most were cost prohibitive. I couldn't convince anyone to spend the money on them, so I was just using a basic suite to get by. I think because I had Vinyl, I got an email about RX and at the moment I saw it, I immediately said "This is it!" I downloaded the demo and it worked flawlessly. I think I used a scene from Catch and brought it to the Director of Post at Max Post in Burbank, CA and played him a before and after. His jaw dropped. He went "All right, what is this going to cost? We've gotta get this." That was it. We now have RX in all our mixing rooms.

I usually tell other mixers about it, and another feature mixer came up to me saying "I love that stuff, I just used it on a film!" When I find a product that really does what it says and goes above and beyond, I'm the first one to go scream about it to my colleagues. It's saved tracks that most people thought were completely unusable.

How much audio do you get that is unusable?

On Catch, the guys are out there risking their lives. I can't tell them that the stuff is terrible, but almost everything is touched by RX at some point. I want to go into the mix knowing the dialog is the best it can be, because there's a lot of other stuff going on in the mix, and I don't want to think "I can't hear the dialogue very well." I want to go in knowing I've got the best stuff from the track before I start mixing.

It sounds like you spend a lot of hours going through dialog for each episode.

On any given show I can have around 700 pieces of fixed dialogue. Going through them individually is really the only way to get the dialogue as clean as possible. My primary goal with any mix before I do sound design is just to make sure we can hear every word as best we can. When the offline comes to me, there's usually a lot of subtitles and awful video. We can usually get rid of one-half to two-thirds of what we thought initially needed to be subtitled, because we're able to dig it out. If we can lose the titles on the screen, it's always better.

In some ways it's kind of liberating because you get what you get, and you have to make it work as best you can. I can't just write a note to the director and say you have to ADR these four lines… that just does not happen. By the time the audio gets back here, the crab season is over, and other than the captains and the deck bosses, everyone has gone home. There's almost no way to get a hold of them anyway; some live in Alaska or Hawaii. We're not going to fly them out to do a line of ADR.

Are there any noises that you just can not get rid of?

Of course! As a sound person you always wish it were cleaner. Maybe the camera mic wasn't working, the lav broke down, or the camera mic was facing in the wrong direction. There's only so much you can do when the signal isn't on the tape.

Deadliest Catch, 1000 Ways to Die, The Colony, Tornado Road, Ax Men… that's a lot of adrenalin! Do you like to do "adventure stuff" when not in the studio?

I am a bit of an adrenalin junkie which made me well suited to do this. In my past I've flown ultralights, gone skydiving, surfing, rode jet skis etc. I love all that stuff. But no crabs at all… just dramatic artists.

How has RX 2 changed your workflow?

Decrackle was the only non-iZotope plug-in I used for Denoising, but with RX 2 I now have it. I'm using the standalone software a bit more now - for the really tough things where I need to be able to preview small parts -- and it is awesome for that. For really troubled things, I'll consolidate, quit ProTools, and get surgical. The selection tools are amazing. The ability to make non contiguous selections and select harmonic frequencies all at once gets to results much faster. I go though mixes looking for stuff I can fix now, things that I wouldn't necessarily have been able to help before. I couldn't get through an episode without it!

I also use Spectron for sound design whenever I want a more organic sound to tweak the hell out of it. I use it when someone's dreaming or hallucinating in the show.

What's next for you? Anything you can share that you're currently working on?

Right now I'm mixing the fourth season of Ax Men for the History Channel. The soundscape is about logging in really unique areas – up in Washington and Oregon, Louisiana and Florida. Most of it takes place on rivers, where they dig up the sunken logs on old waterways that are sometimes 100 years old. The show has a ton of challenges as well to get great sound. Sometimes they use a diving mask that fits over the whole face so they can talk while they at the bottom of a river. All of that audio usually comes out clipped and RX's Declipper makes all that audio useable. They also do heli-logging, where they use helicopters to lift the logs out of the forest. With all that you get hum, wind noise, etc. We'll see how RX 2 holds up!

For more information on Bob Bronow, visit http://www.audiococktail.com/