For 25 years now Prof. Wolfgang Fritz has been chief sound engineer of the Vienna State Opera. After studying at the Radio-technical Institute of the TGM, he became first assistant to the sound engineer, and then sound engineer, at the Vienna Volksoper. When Lorin Maazel took over as director of the Vienna State Opera in the early 1980s and made new demands of the sound technicians, Wolfgang Fritz was appointed at the opera house and he has been in charge of all acoustic matters there ever since. Professor Fritz has also been responsible for the acoustics at the Bregenz Festival since 1969 and has been sound designer of the Seefestspiele Mörbisch since 1993. (The sound technology that Fritz developed in collaboration with the Bregenz Festival is now in use at Mörbisch, too.) Wolfgang Fritz is considered the father of the technology known as "directional hearing", which is now an acoustic standard worldwide. A first successful step towards this technology came in 1998 when he devised a sound system for a production of Turandot in the Forbidden City, Peking, conducted by Zubin Mehta; the sound system comprised directional hearing and space simulation, and was described by American specialists as sensational for open-air opera. In summer 2005, Bregenz Open Acoustics (BOA), a specially designed sound system, was premiered on the Floating Stage at the Bregenz Festival, offering an open-air sound experience unique in the world. The acoustic department of the Festival and Wolfgang Fritz were rewarded for their efforts with the German "Opus" theatre prize in the category of sound design in spring 2006. The innovative acoustic space simulation for the Bregenz Floating Stage was developed in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau and Lawo AG in Rastatt.