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Re: [ARSCLIST] Still trying to nail down the first U.S. all-digital commercial recording
Hi Matt:
Glad to provide some details.
OK, first of all, a listmember answered me off-list. I thank him but since he replied off-list I
will leave it to him to identify himself.
He provided this information.
-----------------------------------
... the recording you refer to was the Virgil
Thomson\Gertrude Stein opera "The Mother of Us All," recorded during the
1976 summer season of the Santa Fe Opera. The (fairly voluminous) recording
credits on the initial LP issue (New World NW-288, 2 LPs) read as follows:
Producer: Andrew Raeburn;
Recording Engineer: Jerry Bruck
Production Manager: Mark Dichter
Mastering: Lee Hulko, Sterling Sound
Recording facilities: Viking Studios, Denver, CO
Chief Engineer: Wade Williams
Assistant Engineers: George Counnas, Ron Oren, Darla Reddick
Recorded at The Armory for the Arts, Santa Fe, NM
Director: Alton Walpole; Assistants: David Bigelow, Matthew Heinz
This was reissued on CD as New World 80288, and is still available in that
format, according to the New World website.
-----------------------------------------------------
Then I contacted the recording engineer, Jerry Bruck. I will paraphrase what Jerry told me, if I get
his permission to post his private response to me, I'll post the whole thing later.
Jerry said that Tom Stockham, inventor of Soundstream, contacted him prior to the session and asked
if he could hang his equipment off the 2-channel mix/monitor buss. The session was recorded to
16-track tape and later mixed down, per the above information. Jerry said that he knew this was a
different world when Stockham called the control room and said there was a hum in the feed coming to
his equipment. Jerry turned the monitors up and didn't hear anything. He called back and asked
Stockham at what level and Stockham replied it was about 80dB down! Can't do that with tape. Jerry
said he compared a 2-track tape recorded off the same buss with the Soundstream after the first
session and said it "left an indelible impression that digital, while not perfect, was the future."
As I reported in a previous post, I don't have any solid info what happened to that first recording
after Stockham used it to demonstrate Soundstream at the next AES convention.
This interview with Jack Renner at Telarc includes Renner's history of how Telarc and Soundstream
got together:
http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/1098jack/
This dovetails with an interview with Stockham here:
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/levitin/pubspages/stockham.html
The early Soundstream system had a lower sampling rate, at first 37.5kHz. Stockham says in the
interview that's the one he used at Santa Fe. The system Telarc embraced -- and Stockham confirms
that the first Soundstream recording released on a commercial product (LP) was Telarc's
Fennell/Cleveland Winds record, in 1978 -- was the final version of Soundstream recorder which was
50kHz/16-bit.
Now, as to the rest of this history, I'll have something for the AES Historical Committee website
when I finish gathering data. Please, ARSC friends, keep the good facts coming!
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Sohn" <mahatma57@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2007 8:49 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Still trying to nail down the first U.S. all-digital commercial recording
>I have confirmed that the Soundstream recording made at Santa Fe in 1976 was not used as the
>master for the LP of that opera. It was a demonstration recording and was used to show off the
>Soundstream system at the subsequent AES convention. One thing I'm trying to track down is what
>happened to that recording.
-- Tom Fine
So what was the name of the opera, and who were the principals (and how the heck did you find
out)?
I got so curious about this the other day when you made your initial post that I called the Santa
Fe Opera, and nobody there could tell me!
-Matt Sohn